Volume control issue in FCP 7 project

Hi,

I'm working on a project that involves 4 channels of audio plus a layer of ambient sound and a layer of music.

The ambient sound layer and music layer have been converted to .aif files and the video has all been converted to Apple Pro Res 422.

Will try and do my best to explain the problem I'm having... When I play the sequence in fcp 7 (and later after I export the video and watch it again) the music layer volume doesn't do what I set it out to do. I have marked it so that the track volume will dip when the music gets louder (I've attached a screenshot to try and show I'm talking about).

The problem is that even though I set this volume control, everything suddenly gets louder at the part where it's supposed to dip lower, then it suddenly gets softer, then suddenly gets louder again. It sounds as if I've set the track to have multiple sudden spikes in volume, which is not the case as you can see in the attachment.

I've had this issue on several projects now and can't figure out what I'm doing wrong.

Thanks,

Dan

OK, I can see by the audio waveforms the audio is louder naturally. You'll need to lower the Levels of the audio even more.

One thing to bear in mind is that audio multiplies itself.
Meaning, if you have one audio clip it will play at it's originally recorded level.
If you add another clip that plays at the same time (stacked on top of each other), the resulting audio for each individual clip will be somewhat louder than either playing by themselves.

Hope that makes sense.