🎙️Multi-track audio muting

❓ What is it?

Multi-track audio muting disables quiet audio in selected tracks to remove background noise, by listening to each track separately.

This is similar to the silence cutting feature, except it analyses each audio track separately (rather than a combined mix-down) and only disables / mutes clips rather than deleting them

🤔 How does it work?

Multi-track audio muting:

• Analyses each selected audio track to identify "silences", similar to how the silence cutting feature does it

• For each audio track:

  • Wherever there is a silence, it adds a cut at the start and end of the silence (with enough padding to make sure it doesn't cut off words)

  • Disables the portion of the clip in the silence, which has the effect of muting the clip without removing it from the sequence (so you can re-enable it if you like)

⚙️ Settings

Multi-track audio muting has the following options:

1. Threshold method: This feature analyses each audio track separately, which means you can let FireCut detect the best threshold for each track automatically, or you can specify a threshold to use. Whenever your audio falls below this threshold, FireCut will treat it as a silence and mute it.

2. Apply to audio tracks: These are the audio tracks you want to mute quiet audio in. All other tracks will be ignored. Even though this feature is technically a "multi-track" feature, you are free to apply it to a single track if you just want to mute one track.

3. Scope: You can decide whether to run the operation on your Full sequence or only on a certain portion that you specify with In / Out points (you can place these in your sequence using the I and O hotkeys)

4. Disable linked video tracks: This option tells FireCut to check which video clips are linked to the audio tracks in scope. If selected, FireCut will disable both the audio and the video clips corresponding to a silence. You should typically not need this settings, but it's there if you wish to hide the video at silent portions (e.g. if you want to show an overlay such as a facecam only at loud moments in its corresponding linked audio)

5. Cutting algorithm: How FireCut performs the cuts (this does not affect where the cuts actually happen). Over time, we release newer and faster algorithms. Currently we offer the following for multi-track audio muting (the recommended algorithms for this are slightly different from silence cutting, because muting is not as expensive an operation for your device):

   • Original: Most reliable but slow, best for short sequences (<30 mins scope)

   • Rapid: Faster and fairly reliable, best for longer sequences (30+ mins scope)

💡 Tips for best outcomes

• Avoid noisy audio (garbage in, garbage out!) because you don't want background noise to be confused with the speaker's voice (some noise is OK, but if it's roughly the same loudness as the speaker, then the analysis won't get you good results)

• Don't work in the timeline while FireCut is working in the background

🙋‍♂️ Common questions, issues, watch-outs

• "Will FireCut disable full audio clips or will it only mute quiet portions in clips?" --> At the moment, this feature is designed to make cuts in your existing audio clips wherever there is silence and mute the newly-created portion of silent clip.