Track compressor and limiter

A track can have its own compressor and limiter, acting on the sound of every clip on it together. Use them to even out a whole voice-over, or to hold a music bed under a ceiling, without setting each clip. This page covers a track’s. A clip has its own compressor and limiter.

Menu: Track ▸ Mix…
Where: The sliders switch in the track headerMix… in the track's right-click menu
Agent tools: set_track

Turn on a track’s compressor or limiter

Open the Track Mix panel for the track.
Tick Compressor or Limit peaks, below Pan. Each turns on at its defaults, and its rows stop being greyed out.
Adjust the rows.

Unticking throws the settings away, so ticking again starts from the defaults. Reset at the foot of the panel turns both off, and resets the track’s volume and pan too.

The header’s sliders switch stays lit while either is on.

Where they sit

Both act on the track’s whole sound: every clip on it, after each clip’s own processing, its volume, fades, crossfades and ducking, and after the track’s volume and pan. The compressor runs first, then the limiter.

A track’s compressor and limiter hear the track after its fader. That’s the difference from a clip’s compressor, which hears the clip before its volume. Turning the track down turns down what reaches them, so a compressor at −20 dB over a track at −6 dB compresses less.

Compressor settings

Control	What it does	Range	Default	Quick picks
Compressor	Turns the track’s compressor on.	on, off	off
Threshold	The level above which it starts turning the track down.	−60 to 0 dB	−18 dB	−30, −24, −18, −12, −6
Ratio	How strongly it turns down sound above the threshold.	1 to 20 :1	3:1	1.5, 2, 3, 4, 8, 20
Attack	How quickly it reacts.	0 to 200 ms	10 ms	1, 5, 10, 30, 100 ms
Release	How quickly it lets go.	10 to 2000 ms	200 ms	50, 100, 200, 500, 1000 ms
Makeup	Gain added afterwards.	0 to 24 dB	0 dB	0, 3, 6, 12

Limiter settings

Control	What it does	Range	Default	Quick picks
Limit peaks	Turns the track’s limiter on.	on, off	off
Ceiling	The highest true peak the track may hand the mix.	−24 to 0 dBTP	−1 dBTP	−1, −2, −3, −6
Release	How quickly the level recovers after a peak.	1 to 1000 ms	100 ms	50, 100, 200, 500 ms

Each control is a slider and a field. A number typed outside the range goes to the nearest end of it.

Use a track as a nest’s bus

A bus is one path that several sounds share. A nest’s whole mix plays through the track its nest clip sits on, so a compressor or limiter on that track acts on everything inside the nest together. Put a voice’s clips in a nest and compress them as one, whatever tracks they’re on inside it.

A nest’s own tracks have no compressor or limiter. Inside an open nest, both sections are greyed out, and their tooltip says “A nest’s mix plays through the dynamics of the track that holds it.” Volume, Pan and Reset still work there.

Nesting a selection doesn’t copy a compressor or limiter from the tracks it came from. The track the nest clip lands on keeps its own.

Exact in the export, approximate in the preview

An export plays each track with a compressor or limiter through them on its own, before the tracks are mixed. That’s exact, and a stem of that track includes them. The master limiter still runs over the mix afterwards.

The preview can only approximate this. Where a track’s clips overlap, such as a crossfade or a nest’s tracks, the preview plays the track’s sound in more than one piece and runs the compressor and limiter on each piece separately. So the pieces can add up past a track limiter’s ceiling while you edit, even though the export holds it.

While any track has a compressor or limiter and the preview plays at normal speed, the Loudness Meter says so in its footer: “The mix as the preview plays it, with track compressors and limiters approximate, before the export’s loudness and master limiter.”

What hears them

Hears them	Doesn’t hear them
The preview, approximately	Normalize
The level meter and the Loudness Meter, approximately	The Loudness readout
Every export and stem, exactly	Enhance Voice and Match Audio
	A scrub

Normalize, the Loudness readout, Enhance Voice and Match Audio work on the clip itself, before the track.

Good to know

A track’s compressor and limiter are one setting for the whole track, and can’t change over time. A track has no EQ or other effects.
Each change is one undo step. Turning one on or off, a drag or a typed value is named “Track Compressor” or “Track Limiter”, and Reset is named “Reset Track Mix”.
A track with a limiter plays 3.3 ms later in the preview, and Frame Job places it 3.3 ms earlier to match, so it stays in sync.

With an agent

set_track sets both, through its compressor and limiter arguments. Each takes the whole setting at once, so any value you leave out goes to its default, and null turns it off. As in the panel, a nest’s own tracks can’t have them. See Tools: tracks, markers and canvas.