 Welcome back fellow techies to our latest tutorial video. I am The Technician Project and today's tutorial we're going to show you how to add compression to an audio file in Audacity. At the moment on our screen we have Audacity open with an audio file inserted into it. This audio file is a vocal recording from our band so we're going to start off Our first thing is going to drag the volume level meter from the top to the bottom and we're going to make it a vertical volume meter. Now we're going to keep an eye on the volume meter whilst we're listening to the track. Now the blue line shows the loud parts and the green line shows how quiet it is. Now the blue line has finished around just above minus 6db. We don't need to worry about the dvs too much but only for our compression and the lowest point I saw was minus 15 so we're going to command A to select all our files and we're going to load the compression unit up. Now it does look very confusing to start off with if you don't know how to use the compressions. All these random faders. If we set our threshold to minus 6db where the loudest point is nothing's going to happen. We want to set our threshold just below the quietest point or around the quietest point so for this video it was minus 15 so there we go set it to minus 15db. The next part is the ratio. The ratio is where you determine how much compression you are going to apply to the signal that goes over your threshold. For example if our signal goes over our threshold of minus 15 the compression will be set according to the ratio. The higher the ratio the harsher the compression is. We're going to set our ratio to 3 to 1 because it's very good for vocals and we have a quick preview of it. Now we previewed it then and it was very very loud so we're going to untick the make up gain for 0db after compressing. That's better. Basically the compressor reduces the dynamic range of your recording by bringing down the level of the loudest parts meaning the loud and quiet parts are now closer together in volume and the natural volume variations are less obvious. We cannot tell a singer to sing louder or quieter on certain parts. They have to sing how they feel within the piece. We don't want to take their enthusiasm away from the song because of the compression just levels everything out. Thanks for watching. Don't forget to like the video if you enjoyed it and subscribe for more and also ding dong that notification bell to get further updates. Thanks again, goodbye.