Adobe Audition – Envelope Plugin

Today’s post is a tutorial on how to use the Envelope plugin in Adobe Audition CS3.

I reacently learned about this feature and it tackled a problem I had been having with my voice over files since I started using my home studio to send out work.

Often times when you are working on a long project and especially if you are doing the sound engineering yourself  … you will tend to take breaks in the middle and to go check on the levels ( I work in a booth to keep the computer fan noise as well as any other ambient noises to a minimum). So every time I leave the booth and come back in… I sit in a slightly different position than the time before… its not intentional and I try to keep the position displacement to a minimum. But its there.

So what that translates to is for some slightly irregular volume in the audio wave file. Correcting this irregularity has been a quest of mine until I stumbled on the Envelope plugin in Adobe Audition.

Here is an example of irregular volume in an audio file:

notice how the first part of the wave is louder than the last part of the wave… this translates to inconsistent volumes… except if you mean to do this… it can be very irritating.

The envelope plugin in adobe audition can be found under the menu section:

Effects >Amplitude and Compression > Envelope (Process)

The plugin is pretty straight forward. You select the part of the wave file that you wish to correct. You figure out where you wish to correct the volume… then you draw a line to represent what parts of the audio you wish to bring the volume down in.

Here is how I corrected that above wave form:

There are a number of presets that are pre-programmed into the plugin… and for all intended purposes the Smooth attack preset is exactly what I need to fix this problem in my wave file… but what I’m going to do is mess with the preset to customize it for the wave form.

So I will tick the spline curves box (the one above the big Reset button in the middle) and I’m going to click on the top left hand point of that blue line… then I’m going to move it to the right so that its a little smoother

so if you look at the blue line now you’ll notice the incline is not as steep as the image before it (incidently you can click on any of these images to make them a bigger).

Click OK and you’re done… that’s it! you’ve corrected the volume issue easily and without too much of a hassle.

here is what it looks like after correction:

compare this to the wave form on top and you’ll notice the difference in the uniformaty of the volume.

Obviously you’ll have volume peaks in different parts of a wave file… so you’ll have to draw the line differently.. and the nice thing about this plugin is that you can add points to the blue line and tell it where you want to lower a volume and how drastically.

That’s it for now folks… I know some of you don’t use Adobe Audition but others do and finding out about this plugin was revelation so .. I hope it helps.

Taji