Blender for audio mixing

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
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I recently had a project where I had to mix a set of simultaneously-recorded audio tracks from 8 different mics. Though I have a Zoom R16 (what I used to make the recording) I don’t have any audio software fancy enough to use an external control surface. And as good as Audacity is for single-track editing and touching up, its lack of non-destructive editing capabilities and inflexible fading controls make it pretty clumsy and almost useless for multi-track mixing.

I wished there was some software that worked like Blender where I could easily keyframe and tweak fading in and out and muting, then I realized Blender works like Blender! I love Blender’s VSE and use it for all my video editing these days, but I had never done any purely audio editing in it, though I saw no reason why it couldn’t be used that way.

So, rambling aside, here is my workflow in case anyone else is interested:

In the 3D view I set up a mixer consisting of a series of empties I use as faders for the audio channels. The volume on each of the 8 tracks is controlled via a driver by the y-position of the corresponding empty. My method of muting the channels is a bit mickey-mousy but it works. In the same driver expression for volume I multiply by the show_name property of the controlling empty. So I turn the Properties > Display > Name option on and off on the fader to unmute/mute the channel, it’s pretty effective since I can easily see which channels are live in the 3d view by which ones have their names shown.

Here’s my window layout:

audioEditingSetup.png1919×1028 199 KB

I have the graph editor on the top and sequence editor on the bottom with the 3D view (for the mixer), properties (for mute control), and driver editor making up a column on the right.

With the coding help of batFINGER from Blender.SE I was able to link the selection of the audio tracks to their corresponding faders to make the process even smoother.

Anyhow, I spend quite a while figuring all this out and was pretty satisfied with the results so I figured I’d share them here in case anyone else is interested. I’m also curious if anyone else has ever used Blender similarly?

1 Like
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I used to be a recording engineer by trade and have software to do the tasks you’re describing, so I never thought to use Blender that way. But hearing you talk about it makes perfect sense that you could. Really good to know. :slight_smile:

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Very Impressive! Why not have an Audio layout in Blender? Have you checked out Reaper? It does what you need, I use it with my R16.

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Nice work. I still prefer a more intuitive audio interface.

Have you looked into any of these?

https://routenote.com/blog/the-10-best-free-daws-available/

I used Reaper for a little while. Something to look into. Mostly I use Vegas however.

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Just a heads up. There is a script for exporting form Blender to Ardour: http://blendervelvets.org/en/blue-velvet/