Touchups — By Selection

Touchups is where you measure each song's silence boundaries and integrated loudness so that AutoCast can play your library cleaner — trimming dead air at the head and tail of files and matching every song to a consistent on-air loudness target. It's two features that work together but that you can run independently.

Touchups offers two ways to apply these measurements to your songs:

• By Selection (this page) — Pick the songs you want to scan, set the options, click Apply. Best for occasional cleanup or for one-off batches you want to handle by hand.
• By Folder — Tell Librarian to watch one or more folders. Any audio file that arrives in a watched folder is scanned and added to the library automatically, using the settings you defined for that folder. Best for ongoing operations like a voice-track production pipeline.

What Touchups Actually Does

Two operations, each independently togglable:

Silence Trimming

Librarian scans the file and finds where audible content actually begins and ends. It writes two values into the library:

• TrimStart — milliseconds of silence at the beginning that AutoCast should skip past when playing the song.
• TrimEnd — milliseconds of silence at the end that AutoCast should treat as "the song's done" before the file's natural end.

You can choose to trim only the start, only the end, or both. The audio file itself is unchanged — only AutoCast's playback behavior changes when it reads these values.

SteadyCast™ (loudness leveling)

Librarian measures the file's integrated loudness using the broadcast-standard ITU-R BS.1770 algorithm and writes two values into the library:

• LUFS — the measured loudness as a single number, e.g. −18.3.
• LUFSTarget — either Voice or Music, telling AutoCast which of its two loudness preferences this song should be matched to.

At playback, AutoCast computes the gain needed to bring the song to the matching target (set in AutoCast Preferences) and applies that gain in real time. A song measured at −20 LUFS, tagged Voice, with AutoCast's Voice target set to −14 LUFS will play +6 dB louder than the file natively is — without re-encoding the file.

Running a Scan

1. Select songs in the middle pane. Use the filter rows to narrow down (e.g., all songs in your VoiceTracks folder, or every song with no LUFS value yet).
2. Choose what to do. Tick Silence Trimming, SteadyCast™, or both. Each opens its own settings beneath it.
3. Configure each operation:
   • Silence Trimming → pick Start, End, or Both, and set the Aggressiveness slider.
   • SteadyCast™ → pick Voice or Music, and confirm the LUFS slider value.
4. Click Apply. Librarian works through every selected song and reports per-file progress next to the buttons. A Cancel button appears during the run so you can stop mid-batch.

The Aggressiveness Slider

Aggressiveness controls how eager Silence Trimming is to call something "silence." A single slider drives three internal values together so you don't have to think about them individually:

Lower values are gentler — only obvious, lengthy near-silent passages will be trimmed. Higher values are more eager, cutting closer to the audible content. The default of 5 works for most material; bump it up if you have files with long quiet intros that should be tighter, or back it off if Librarian is trimming things that should stay.

"Pre-roll" is a tiny bit of audio left in before the first detected sound, so the trimmed playback doesn't start with a click or an abrupt jolt. At default, you get 50 ms of lead-in; at aggressive settings, only 20 ms.

Re-analyze Already-Scanned Files

By default, Touchups skips songs that already have values in the relevant columns — running again is a no-op for any file that's been scanned before. Tick Re-analyze already-scanned files to force a fresh measurement on every selected song. Useful when you've changed the Aggressiveness or LUFS target and want existing entries updated.

Apply and Restore Original

Two action buttons at the bottom:

• Apply — Run the configured measurements on the selected songs and save the results to the library.
• Restore Original — Clear all four Touchups columns (TrimStart, TrimEnd, LUFS, LUFSTarget) for the selected songs. Confirms with a dialog before doing anything. Audio files are untouched — this just removes the annotations Librarian wrote.

How It Manifests in AutoCast

Once the values are written to the library, AutoCast honors them every time it plays a song:

• TrimStart: AutoCast begins playback that many milliseconds into the file rather than at frame zero. Leading silence is gone.
• TrimEnd: AutoCast stops playback that many milliseconds before the file's natural end. Trailing silence is gone. EOM/Cue/Ramp timing in the Transitions tab is automatically computed against the trimmed end.
• LUFS + LUFSTarget: AutoCast computes target − measured and applies that many dB of gain to the song's playback. Songs measured quieter than the target play louder; songs measured louder than the target play softer. Every song ends up at roughly the same on-air loudness without any change to the file on disk.

AutoCast also enforces a Clip Safety Ceiling on the gain value — a quiet file that would otherwise need +20 dB of gain to hit target gets capped, with optional soft limiting on the output, to prevent clipping or distortion. Configure this in AutoCast's Audio Levels preferences along with the Voice and Music loudness targets themselves.