Audio overlay and audio insert

An overlay does not change the length of the recording: the clip plays at the same time, as a second layer. An insert cuts the recording at the chosen point, puts the clip inside and pushes everything after it — the recording gets longer. The timeline shows which is which: an insert colors a stretch inside the waveform, an overlay appears on its own lane below.

Leave the snap-to-pauses box ticked. The tool finds the pauses between phrases in advance, shows them as light bands and pulls the insert point to the nearest one. The threshold is derived from the recording itself, so it works on a quiet phone memo and on a loud studio take alike. If you need an exact spot, hold Alt while dragging and snapping turns off.

Raise the crossfade in the clip settings. The last fraction of a second of the recording then plays together with the beginning of the clip, and the transition stops being an abrupt cut. The curve is equal-power, so there is no volume dip in the middle that a plain linear fade produces. The default is 120 ms, which is enough almost every time.

Press Match loudness and the clip is aligned to the integrated loudness of the recording under EBU R128. Peak matching is no good here: music and speech have different density, and at the same peak the music sounds clearly louder. If music has to run under speech, also raise Duck background — the recording steps down exactly under the clip.

Yes, in the Batch block. It applies the clips you have already set up to several recordings at once. Each clip gets an edge to count from: an intro sticks to the start of the file, an outro to the end, so episodes of different lengths come out right. Batch processing is part of Premium; one-at-a-time work stays as it is.