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Comment by minxomat | Hacker News Reader

This is almost impossible to listen to. If one must have background music in a video, use some god damn sidechain compression. Or even better, drop the music. /rant

Aside from that - awesome.

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What is sidechain compression?

you put a compressor on the background music with the sidechain input set to the channel your microphone is on, so when you speak the music is automatically pushed to the background and you can actually hear the mic.

In this case, it's basically where when the presenter is speaking, the music quiets at the exact moment, so you can hear more clearly but still have the music.

Rather than having voice over and background music clashing at the same volume levels, the music level would decrease whenever the voice over signal is active.

Thanks! Confusing because I think "bitrate" when I hear "compression" but it actually refers to the volume level.

What the other poster is describing is more commonly called "ducking". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ducking

The secondary audio (background music) automatically lowers when the primary audio (narration) is active. It allows the narrator to talk over the background music without being muffled by the music.

An automated way to do this is in audio production is by using the sidechain input of a dynamic range compressor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_range_compression#Side...

Thanks for the feedback! I fixed it in part 2, let me know if it's still an issue for you. Also, I did not know that's how it's implemented in real life (learned it from this thread). Perhaps I should try building that in Web Audio in another series!

And it you're adding the music after the speech is recorded, you can use look-ahead so the music can fade out gently before each piece of speech instead of having to abruptly cut off to avoid obscuring it.

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