How to Record Your Voicetracks

Voicetracking with VoiceTracker is fast, natural, and forgiving. Once you've done a couple, you'll settle into an easy rhythm and fly through an entire show in minutes. Here's how it works.

The Rhythm of a Voicetracking Session

The best way to think about voicetracking is as a simple, repeating rhythm. For each voicetrack slot in your show, you:

1. 1
   Listen — hear a few seconds of the outgoing and incoming songs to get your bearings.
2. 2
   Record — talk naturally over the transition, just like you would in the studio.
3. 3
   Fine-tune — drag the songs to adjust how they overlap with your voice.
4. 4
   Save and advance — press one key to save and move to the next slot.

That's it. Each voicetrack takes about 30 to 60 seconds from start to finish. A full hour of voicetracks typically takes five to ten minutes.

Step by Step

Select a Voicetrack Slot

In the right panel, click a date to load that day's program log. The hours list shows only the hours that contain voicetrack slots — hours with no voicetracks are hidden, so you see exactly the hours that need your attention. Click an hour to display its contents. Voicetrack slots appear as green boxes in the log — click one to load it into the recording deck. The deck shows three waveform bars: Song A (the outgoing song) on top, your voicetrack in the middle, and Song B (the incoming song) on the bottom.

Listen to the Transition

Press Space to preview the transition. You'll hear the tail of Song A and the intro of Song B, with your voicetrack area silent in between. This gives you a feel for the mood, tempo, and energy of the transition — and helps you decide what to say.

Press Space again to stop the preview. You don't need to listen to the whole thing — a few seconds of each song is usually enough.

Record Your Voicetrack

Press Space to start the preview playing again, then press R when you're ready to talk. The status bar turns red and the mic goes live. Talk naturally — introduce the song, share a fact from your ShowPrepper notes, do a station ID, whatever the moment calls for.

When you're done talking, press Space to stop everything.

Fine-Tune the Transition

After recording, your voicetrack waveform appears in the middle bar. Now you can adjust how the three tracks overlap:

• Drag Song A to the left to pull it back, giving your voice more room at the start.
• Drag Song B to the left to bring it in sooner, creating overlap with your voice. Drag it right to give yourself more room.
• Use the scroll wheel to zoom in for precision or zoom out to see the big picture.

Press Space to listen back and hear the full mix — Song A, your voicetrack, and Song B together, with the music automatically ducking under your voice. If it doesn't sound right, drag the songs and listen again. You can adjust and re-listen as many times as you like.

Save and Move On

Happy with the take? Press ↓ (Down Arrow). VoiceTracker saves the voicetrack to Dropbox, encodes the transition timing into the filename so AutoCast knows exactly what to do, and automatically advances to the next voicetrack slot. You're ready to record the next one.

Not happy? Press Esc to discard the take and start fresh.

Working Through Your Show

Each hour in the program log has its own set of voicetrack slots. Work through them one by one with the ↓ key. When you finish the last voicetrack slot in an hour and press ↓ one more time, VoiceTracker automatically loads the next hour that has voicetracks. The first voicetrack slot is selected for you, and ShowPrepper fires off a request for the new hour's show notes — so by the time you've listened to the first transition, your talking points are ready.

This means you can voicetrack your entire show without ever going back to click on hours in the list. Just keep pressing ↓ and VoiceTracker handles the transitions between hours for you. When you've finished the last voicetrack in the last hour, VoiceTracker lets you know with a "All voicetracks complete" message.

Music Ducking

During playback, Song A and Song B automatically duck (reduce in volume) wherever they overlap with your voicetrack. This gives you a realistic sense of how the transition will sound on the air. The default duck level is 30%, but you can adjust it in the Music Ducking slider in Settings. Set it to whatever feels comfortable for your monitoring setup.

Quick Reference