When editing a podcast, interview, or any multi-speaker recording, most people will end up with a single audio track that contains all speakers combined. Which is nice and simple when recording the content, but it makes it difficult to apply effects, EQ, or volume adjustments to each voice individually. If you're recording in ideal conditions, this isn't too much of an issue, however, if things are a little intense or you're doing a remote project, you might want to split the audio tracks for each speaker and now Davinci Resolve finally as an automated feature called Checkerboard that does it all for you.
Takeaways:
- Is there an easy way to split speakers into separate tracks in Davinci Resolve?
- AI tools to split podcast speakers into different audio tracks?
Table of Contents
How to Automatically Split Speakers into Separate Tracks in DaVinci Resolve
- After importing your project into DaVinci Resolve and ensuring your audio is on the timeline, switch to the Fairlight tab. You can do this by clicking the musical note icon at the bottom of the interface.
- Once you're on the Fairlight tab, select the audio track that contains the combined voices. This should be a single track where both speakers can be heard.
- With the audio track selected, right-click on it. In the context menu, navigate to AI Tools, then choose Checkerboard to New Tracks.
- This tool will begin analysing the audio content using AI. It detects distinct speakers by their voice characteristics and automatically organises each speaker’s dialogue into a new audio track.
- The AI will transcribe and evaluate the audio to determine how many speakers are present. In most typical cases, such as a two-person podcast, it will create two separate tracks. But if there are more, you can expect to get more tracks.
- Each new track will contain the dialogue of one identified speaker. The original track remains unchanged, and the new tracks are placed below it in the timeline.
Workflow Optimisation
Once the process is complete, the new tracks will be labelled generically, such as "Speaker 1" and "Speaker 2." You can easily listen to a short segment of each to determine who is speaking.
To rename a track, right-click the track header and select Rename Track. Assign descriptive names, such as "Host" and "Guest" or the speakers’ actual names. This helps keep your project organised as you continue editing. It's also a handy idea to change the track colour as well, which you can do by right-clicking on it and choosing a colour.
Apply Effects and Adjustments Independently
Now that each speaker has their own track, you can apply audio effects independently. For example, you might want to boost clarity for one speaker, apply a noise gate to another, or use different EQ profiles to account for differences in microphone quality or speaking style.
Because the voices are no longer intertwined on a single waveform, you gain much greater control over the overall mix and polish of your audio. This is especially handy if you are using different microphones for your recordings. If you have bad audio that needs repairing, I highly suggest checking out this guide on Davinci Resolve Voice Convert Feature. It's a voice cloning tool designed to fix audio issues in original audio tracks. You can also combine this feature with DaVinci Resolve’s AI ADR cues if you want to generate automatic transcriptions or subtitles based on the separated tracks.
