For a year, I volunteered to help my wife's 'Community Bible Study' group edit down two full 1 hour talks to fit on a single 74 minute CD as two audio tracks. I made roughly 20 of these CDs for those folks and we had a CD duping machine to make the copies.

I used Tracktion for this and it's one area where it's editing feature simply runs circles around the method you describe. In Tracktion, each audio 'clip' has graphic fader handles on each end of the clip. Pregnant pauses, repeated statements, etc. can be quickly snipped out of the audio with the '/' button (looks like an old-school razor blade actually, for you old tape-experienced folks). Slighly overlapping clips automatically brings up a cross-fade dialog, etc. There's no menu picks, nothing - it's all graphically driven.

Ducking, or side-chain compression as it's also known, works well if you are o.k. with the pauses in between the spoken word. In my role, I was primarily a content editor - again, taking a good 15 - 20 minutes out of a 60 minute recording, bit by bit. I was given that authority and pretty soon if you have to do that a lot, you realize that doing this process where there might be 60+ edits in a single recording, you don't want to mess around with menus.

I also produced a series of pre-recorded 15 minute radio shows for a pastor in Flint, MI, where we had bumper music (mine!) on the front 30s and tail 30s end of the show. The pastor's brother Craig calls local HS sports on Flint radio and has that 'radio announcer voice': big, deep, smooth, etc.

I started down the road with trying to set up ducking for the bumper music, but since it was a fixed 15 minute time period every week - with Craig coming in to announce the show and send off the show at the end with the same track each week, there was no need to have the music in the middle 14 minutes of the show, nor duck the music with his vox. I used graphic fades on the bumper music and in the end, the pastor learned how to use Tracktion to record his 14 minutes in the middle each week in a template project.

The benefit of using graphic fading, as to destructive gain changes, is that you can always change it without losing quality of the audio. You CAN do this in PG products now - volume envelope editing. Destructive gain change is one way to do it, but file size is now cheap - keep the file the way that it is and just do graphic gain changes vs. permanent destructive gain changes.

Try it that way and see what you think. rharv can point you the way specifically. I don't have the latest version of PTPA to tell you the way this is done.

-Scott

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