Music that gets out of the way when you talk
Ducking is the radio trick that makes a music bed feel produced: it dips when you speak and swells when you breathe. Load voice and music, dial three knobs, hear it live, export.
Free · no account · runs in your browser — nothing is uploaded; your audio never leaves your device.
Preview renders the blend with your current settings — move a slider and it re-renders in place, keeping your spot. You can see the ducks in the waveform.
Ducking one bed is a trick. Scoring a show is the studio.
PodDJ picks music that fits your show's tempo, cuts it into intro/outro/bed sections on the beat, and ducks it under every word — automatically. Sign up: 3 full packs free.
The one rule of music beds
If a listener notices the bed, it's too loud; if they notice its absence when it ducks away, it's doing its job. Start the bed around 60%, duck −12 dB, and then do the real test: listen on phone speakers, because that's where beds eat voices. The preview here runs the actual duck live — what you hear is exactly what exports.
How to duck music under a voice
- Load the voiceDrop the voice track in the voice box.
- Load the musicDrop the music bed in the music box.
- Set the duckingAdjust Duck amount, Release and Bed level.
- PreviewPress Preview the ducked blend to hear the music dip under speech.
- ExportPress Export blend to WAV.
Frequently asked questions
What is audio ducking?
Automatic volume control on one track keyed by another: when the voice track has energy, the music's gain dips by the duck amount; when the voice pauses, it recovers over the release time. It's how radio, podcasts, and documentaries keep beds present without fighting speech.
What settings should I start with?
Duck amount around −12 dB, release around 400 ms, threshold just above the voice track's noise floor. Talky, dense shows like deeper ducks (−15 dB) and quicker releases; sparse narration can float on −9 dB and a slow, musical recovery.
Why does the music pump up and down annoyingly?
Release too fast or threshold too close to the noise floor — the ducker is chasing every syllable. Lengthen the release and raise the threshold until the bed breathes with sentences, not words.
Can I use this for voiceovers and YouTube too?
Exactly the same physics — narration over music is narration over music. Export the blend, or export your settings knowledge to any DAW's sidechain compressor.