Trying to make a dead air killer in a DAW

GTE

Hello!

I am trying to make a dead air killer for the radio station using software.

I was thinking of doing the following.

Track 1 is the broadcast.
Track 2 is a CD player on repeat.

Track 2 would have a compressor followed by a gate. Track 1 would be side chained into track 2 compressor. This would heavily compress track 2 when there is signal in track 1. The gate would then kill it off completely.
When track 1 goes quiet, track 2 compressor eases off and the gate opens and now the CD player is being broadcast.

We need attack times of about 10 to 20 seconds for this to work. Do you guys know of any plugins with attack times as huge?

Any completely seperate ideas for something like this? We could go hardware (which I would prefer) but we probably will not get funding for that.

Thanks,
bbk

krd

10 or 20 seconds is a massive amount of time in terms of dead air.

The attack on your compressor, will be much shorter (could be around 500milsec I don't think it would go beyond 3 to 5 seconds)

You should also think of the background music as a music bed. And have it drop in level, and not completely gate it out, as that would sound really jarring.

I know how to do what you want done in Ableton. You wouldn't even need CDs you could prepare sound clips - that would loop neatly - the talk over music beds are usually looped clips of instrumental pieces of music - voices tend to clash.