How to lower background sound on a podcast track

Background music or room ambience can make a podcast feel more complete, but it should not compete with the words. If listeners have to strain to follow your voice, lower the background track and check the mix again before you export.

You can do this in TooLab’s Audio Editor by keeping the speech and background sound on separate tracks and adjusting the background track’s level. If they are already combined into one file, you may not be able to turn down only the background sound.

Lower the background track

1. Open the Audio Editor and add your podcast voice and background sound as separate tracks. Keeping them separate lets you change one without lowering the other.
2. Play a section where the voice and background sound are both present. Listen for words that become hard to understand, especially at the ends of sentences and during quieter speech.
3. Select the background track and reduce its volume with that track’s level control. If it shows decibels, try lowering it by about 6 dB as a first adjustment. If it uses a slider, move it down a small amount instead.
4. Play the same section again, then listen to a passage with quiet speech and one with louder speech. Make another small adjustment if the music still draws your attention away from the words.
5. Use a fade at the start or end if the background sound begins or stops abruptly. When the mix sounds balanced, export a copy as WAV or MP3 and listen to that exported file.

A 6 dB reduction cuts the sound signal’s amplitude roughly in half, but it does not necessarily sound half as loud to your ears. Treat it as a useful first move, not a guaranteed final setting.

What the result means

You can follow every word without focusing on the music

The background track is probably low enough for this passage. Check other parts of the episode too. A level that works under energetic speech may cover a quiet sentence, a pause, or a softer voice.

The music is still the first thing you notice

Lower the background track a little more and listen again. You want to hear that it is there without having to compete with it. Try the passage on headphones and on a phone or laptop speaker, since small speakers can make speech harder to distinguish.

The voice and background sound both seem quiet

Check that you are adjusting the background track, not the whole mix. If the voice track itself is too low, lowering the music further may help, but the better next step is to raise the voice track or correct its recording level separately.

The voice still sounds unclear even with the music low

The background may not be the only cause. The recording could have room noise, a muffled microphone, or speech that was recorded too softly. Listen to the voice track on its own to tell whether the problem is present before the music is added.

Fix common balance problems

1. Lower the music in small steps. A large drop can make the background disappear in some parts while still failing to fix unclear speech in others. Make one change, replay the passage, and stop when the voice is easy to follow.
2. Check the quietest speech. Find a sentence spoken more softly than the rest and test the mix there. If the music masks it, reduce the background level enough for those words to remain clear.
3. Check the loudest speech for clipping. Clipping is harsh distortion caused when the audio signal exceeds its available range. If the voice sounds crackly or suddenly rough, lowering the background track will not fix that problem. Check the voice recording and its level separately.
4. Fade music at the edges. A sudden start or stop can sound like an editing mistake. Use a short fade to ease the background in or out, then replay the transition with the speech.
5. Listen to the exported file. Exporting gives you a chance to catch a change that was easy to miss while editing. Play the file from beginning to end, including the opening, pauses, and ending, before you share it.

If the speech and background are in one file

When voice and music have already been mixed into a single track, lowering that track turns down both sounds together. The Audio Editor can cut, fade, change speed or pitch, join audio on tracks, and export WAV or MP3, but a combined recording does not provide separate voice and music controls.

If you have the original voice recording and music file, add them as separate tracks and rebuild the mix. If you only have the combined file, look for the project or separate source files used to make it. Trying to remove just the music from a finished mix can also damage parts of the voice, so do not expect a clean result from a simple volume change.

The Audio Editor runs in your browser, and the audio files you open and edit stay on your device.