The Audio mixer is the WORST part of this program

[aj327]

I'm sorry but I just have to vent here. I've been using VSP for over 10 years now and there are parts about the software that I absolutely love. It's so intuitive and easy to get going on almost every aspect without really needing to look up how to do most things. My only real gripes are that it's not the most stable program and often shuts down randomly or says files are corrupt until I restart the program. Things like that. But the audio mixer is infuriatingly awful. I've been messing with a mothers day present where I narrate a bunch of pictures set to music and no matter what I do I can't get the music to be at a constant level just lower than my voice. Audio ducking is a joke so I go in and manually change the volume as I go and it can sound close to the way I want it but when i render it I can't hear the music at all for whole sections or my voice is way too loud. It's just junk. And the volume controls vary from barely doing anything to being super ridiculously touchy. Like I had to increase the volume of my voice to 300 and reduce the volume of the music to 4 just to hear myself. How stupid is that? But controlling the volume using those little slider controls in the Audio track is stupidly difficult. Just a little nudge and you've gone from 0 to -5 and you didn't even mean to do it - you were just trying to grab hold of the stupid line. It's just piss poor coding that they don't think is worth fixing most likely but man it is just the worst. I've even tried jumping ship to Premiere or After Effects because it's such a time waster dealing with the audio issues but it ended up not being worth the time investment. So I just keep hoping year after year that they fix the crap audio "features" in VSP and they never do. Sad really. Such a great program otherwise.

[asik1]

You are 100% correct.
Have you set tracks height to large? this can ease the pain of leveling just a bit.

[aj327]

I have. The problem is that the way the video sounds can vary from one listening to the next sometimes without me even doing anything to the audio. It's not until you render that you know what your output will be so you have to adjust based on what you're hearing after you've rendered. Such a time waster. It's weird because I have six sisters and we each contributed a 3 minute speaking part that I set to different music and only my part was super difficult. I think it was because I used Somewhere in Time and it has parts that get super loud and others that are super quiet so you can't just set it to one low volume and have it work. But it was as if the microadjustments that I spent hours on didn't make a difference. Some renders the music would just drop out entirely and others it was way too loud. I finally got a passable render an hour ago, but it's not perfect by any means. I mean I spent a couple weeks working on this thing and even though I think it's good, it doesn't reflect the amount of time I put into this because the audio is just so uneven through the whole thing.

And thank God for the .mov option of rendering. Half my mini-videos failed at around 96% and I had no idea which file or part of the video the render process didn't like. For whatever reason when you render to a .mov file though you get the "could not read" error but it keeps right on rendering anyway whereas all the other file formats quit and you get nothing. I would have literally pulled out my hair trying to troubleshoot that since each video used like 40 pictures and there were little subtitles and PNG effects etc. Who knows what it decided not to like. None of my files were actually corrupt. Buy you never know what VSP will just decide not to like. But those kind of stability issues have been a problem since it was called Ulead, but what can you expect for a 70 dollar program? It's just too bad because I've tried lots of different video editors over the years and VSP is just the easiest and most intuitive to use. Trying to do relatively simple things on After Effects takes me forever. I'm either doing it wrong or VSP is just way quicker for simple edits. Like if I knew there was a real "pro" version of VSP that cost 500 bucks and the only difference was that it was super stable and headaches like the audio issues were fixed I'd totally buy it. So worth it. But for a 70 dollar price tag, I don't see them doing a deep dive trying to clean up their code any time soon.

[Davidk]

Adi mentioned setting track height to large. where???

[lata]

Hi
Make sure Show all Visible tracks are deselected and that Sound Mixer is not selected
To the left shows the timeline name as Voice, right click for options.
Or
Float the mouse over the line at the bottom of the voice track till you see the double arrow cursor, drag the track line down to increase the track height
To make things even larger detach the timeline panel and increase its size.
Settings – Layout settings to save UI layout

aj327
I have never used Normalize Audio so cannot comment on its performance, have you tried to see if it does help in levelling the voice over clips.

[asik1]

Adi mentioned setting track height to large. where???

Here

And AJ, nor VS or AE are meant for delectate audio work, for this there are Mixing software.
One that we use when in need is the freeware Audacity.
Export each track from VS and level them there.