TuneTracker System in Action

# VT - The Voice-Track Command

# VT (TuneTracker Command Center™ Only)

With the # VT command added to your logs, TuneTracker can overlap a voice-track with music. The overlap can happen over the end of a song, the start of a song, or if the voice-track is surrounded by songs before and after, both! All that's required is that you mark your songs to indicate how much time you want to allow for overlap during the intro and ending of the songs, using the attributes, "onramp" and "offramp." Normally the amount of overlap to specify for the front part of a song is the number of seconds of instrumental heard before the singing starts. On an all-instrumental song, the onramp time is often the number of seconds before the main melody is heard.

The basics are to:

  1.   Mark the onramp and offramp attributes of your song files
  2.   Add lines like those in the examples below to your logs.


  •   Example 1:

    /boot/Station/PSAs/PSA03.mp3
    # VT
    /boot/Station/VoiceTracks/MonHr21Track3.wav
    /boot/Station/Music/Westminster Abbey/StraightUp.mp3

In Example 1, the line containing "# VT" tells TuneTracker that the very next line in the log is a voice-track. In the example above, TuneTracker will not attempt to overlap the voice-track with the PSA, because no offramp is marked on the PSA. In the imaginary example, the song StraightUp, has a 15 second onramp marked in its attributes. Since the voice-track MonHr21Track3.wav is 45 seconds long, TuneTracker will play the first 30 seconds of the voice-track, then start the song playing (at a reduced, "ducked" volume) beneath the voice-track. As the voice-track ends, TuneTracker will turn up the volume on the song, just in time for the listeners to hear the start of the singing.


  •   Example 2:

    Rotate Genre Rock
    # VT
    /boot/Station/VoiceTracks/MonHr21Track3.wav
    Rotate Genre ClassicRock

In this second example, TuneTracker will attempt to overlap the voice-track with both songs. If the first song's offramp is marked and the next song's onramp is marked, TuneTracker will overlap as much voice-track as it has available, with both songs. If the total of the two ramps is greater than the total length of the voice-track, TuneTracker will divvy up the voice-track between the two to the best of its abilities.

There are two ramp overlap settings in TuneTracker System Prefs that can be tweaked to your liking. "Ducking" can be set to a percentage of full volume and represents the amount the song is turned down while the voice-track is playing . We recommend .3 (about one third) volume. The other setting tells TuneTracker how long to fade the song up or down when transitioning from voice-track to song or from song to voice-track. We recommend one second, and at a minimum, one-half second (.5).

Ducking is not performed on the offramps of songs, since they're almost always doing their own natural fade-down, and ducking winds up turning them down too much. So just make certain, when marking the offramp attribute of your songs, that its length doesn't include a part of the song prior to the start of its natural fade-down.



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