Ducking signal overload

demers's icon

Hello all,

I'm adapting the ducking patch provided in Max compression tutorial 9 to work with two sets of prerecorded files - voice-over and field recordings - so that whenever the voice-over plays (in the 'right input'), the field recordings (in the 'left input') are made quieter.

The problem I've encountered is that in the patch adc~ is used, and it seems to make the atodb~ object go no lower than around -54 dB, whereas with the soundfiles, whenever the voice-over goes silent, atodb~ goes to -999. This messes with the 'abitofmath' subpatch and creates huge numbers which could blow the speakers!

Any ideas how to fix this? Many thanks,