Breath Control

When the breathing is louder than the words

That's what Breath control is for. It sits in the Effects tab in the panels on the right, alongside the repairs in Effects: Repair Your Sound.

A level changes how loud each breath is, never how long, so your pacing survives. And every breath is reviewable on its own, so a deliberate gasp can stay while the rest come down.

Set a level for the whole episode

Breath control gives you three strengths. Start at Light, listen back to a passage where the breathing is obvious, and step up from there. Bring the breathing down rather than out: the same restraint that keeps a bit of room noise in a recording applies to breaths too.

The first time you pick a level on a long recording, nothing changes for a few minutes: pick it, leave it, and come back to the breathing already down.

Picking a level from Original starts a new composition, so the untouched recording is still there to go back to.

Review breaths one at a time

Every breath in the transcript is marked with a small wind icon. Right-click a marker to open its review popover.

To walk the episode instead of hunting markers, use the breath counter under the level control. It shows the breath you're on out of the total, and its chevrons step to the next or previous one.

Inside the popover, Preview plays the breath in context. Quieter takes another bite out of it with each press. Shorter is for a breath that drags rather than one that's only loud: each press pulls a little more time out. The line underneath is where that breath now stands.

Quieter and the levels leave your timing alone. Shorter removes time, so the composition gets shorter: the one place breath work changes the length of your episode.

A breath you set by hand stays where you put it: later levels leave it alone. Reset puts it back to how you recorded it and hands it back to the levels.

Keep a breath exactly as recorded

Some breaths are performance: a gasp, or a sharp pull before a punchline. Right-click that marker and click Keep original. The breath goes back to how you recorded it, and no later level touches it.

Put every automatic reduction back

Click Off and every automatic reduction across the composition comes out in one undoable step. Popover decisions survive it: Quieter, Shorter and Keep original all stay put. To undo one of those, right-click its marker and click Reset.

Where breath decisions live

Breath work stays with the composition you're editing, and a duplicate starts out sounding the same.

Right-clicking a podcast in your library and choosing Reset clears your breath work along with every composition and edit, and the next level you pick starts the few-minute wait over. That cannot be undone.