Hi folks,
I need a little help setting up a macro for breath reduction. I’ve tried before, but could never get it to work properly.
Range tool / split range / -10dB clip volume reduction / crossfade
Thanks in advance,
Robin
I hardly dare to ask - but have you ever tried Waves’ DeBreath or iZotope’s Breath Control? I know, 3rd party stuff, but real time-savers.
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My favorite’s DeBreath from Waves.
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Thanks for the replies, guys. The ‘automated’ plugins are great mostly. Unfortunately I work a great deal with our indigenous languages here in South Africa (Xhosa, being one of them). The languages have awesome tongue clicks and phonetics and often rely on breaths as part of the expression. Most of the time de-clickers, de-noisers and de-breath are impossible to use. It just takes a lot of manual editing and knowledge to know what to keep. 
The macro would be great for this…
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Wow … a beautiful example of how much there is to take care for when developing audio tools. Very enlightening, thanks.
Good luck!
Yes, it is interesting! We have 11 official languages including Khiosan, one of the oldest languages in the world.
Thanks for the wishes Dietz!
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For dialog and voiceover in Spanish or American English I find that the de-breath offerings from Waves or Izotope remove or truncate soft consonant starts and ends like “F’s” and “S’s”. Human voice dynamics can go from hard to soft and back, not really possible in my experience to find a setting that doesn’t cause me to go back in and do a lot of fixes and at that point I’d rather do it all by hand so I don’t miss anything. john
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I hear you John! We’re in the same boat
No doubt about that! OTOH, I couldn’t care less when I sit in front of 48 tracks of backing vocals which need to get cleaned quickly. 
Good point, if I was doing music I am sure I would feel the same!
I just use the old fashioned method.
-Assign Keycommand to “Gain”
-set DOP to Auto apply
===> Use range tool to select the breath
===>Hit key Command
Done
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Thanks Fredo!! I was hoping to hear from you 
Hi Robin,
Did you figured out how to do the Crossfades in this macro ?
I just want to add a crossfade befor and after the lowered breath-clip.
Would be nice, to hear how you did that.
Thanks!
Highlight the range you want, and press the shortcut for this command. It cuts it, lowers the volume (I have it lowering by 3db), and applies a crossfade before and after.
The “apply standard fade out” and “remove fades” lines in the macro allows you to press the key command multiple times without it opening the crossfade editor. Works perfectly! Took me a while to figure it out. Without these lines, if you pressed the macro more than once, the crossfade editor would open. Now though, every time you press it, it just lowers it another 3db (while keeping the crossfade)
I’ll also mention I work in “Video Follows Edit Mode” - not sure if the macro works perfectly if you aren’t in that mode.
**EDIT - here is a video of this macro being used: Frame.io
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Man! Thank you so much! I´ll try this asap. Took me some hours to figure out how to do it but no luck. Can´t wait to try it! THANKS!!!
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Aloha! I never got it to work the way I wanted it to, but I’ll check out the solution from ‘nogills’.
2 Years , and still no solution…till now ?! Hopefully 
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It works! You just need to cut and highlight the section with the breath/ess and apply. I’ve assigned the letter ‘Y’.
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Thank you nogills!!! You’re a star!!!
Hi nogills,
I stole your Macro settings, Could it be that this method requires a already highlighted section to work as expected ?
Perfect fit for me would be to
- select a range ( f.e. breath ) with the Range - Selection - Tool.
- Hit the macro to apply cuts at the begining and the ende of the range
- Apply fades at the beginning and the end like this:
What i get with your method looks like this:
I already spend a lot of time to find a perfect solution for this, because there is lots of edits to do and this would help so much. I would even spend money to make this work.
Greg Ondo made a tutorial on this,
(How to Create a Minimize Breath Macro in Cubase | Q&A with Greg Ondo - YouTube )
but he unfortunately skipped the fades for some reason. I mean it works without fades, but i want to make sure, that there are no clitches or so.
I think what i´m missing is the function, that the section gets highlighted to apply a standard crossfade ( x ) to the snipped section.
I appreciate your help very much !
EDIT: Greg´s macro looks like this and werks perfectly fine except for the Fades.
