Cross Fade

It has bothered me that the “Cross Fade” effect does NOT do what it says on the tin.

Also, using the Envelope tool to produce fades and cross-fades is fiddly and time consuming.

When fading out a track I often prefer to start the fade gradually, then more rapidly, and finally more gradually to create a “bell curve” shape to the fade.
When fading in a track I frequently want to start the fade in quite rapidly, then make it more gradual.

Sometimes I want to fade a track, but not all the way down to silence - possibly just fade the level by 6dB. I would like an effect that does this automatically rather than having to try and draw a load of control points with the Envelope Tool.

While all of the above have been possible in Audacity, they are rather fiddly and awkward to accomplish… Until Now !

With my New X-Fade Plug-in, all of the above can be achieved quickly and easily with just a few clicks of the mouse. :smiley:

[Updated to version 0.1.1 in next post]
This plug-in is version 0.1 - hot off the press with little field testing.
Due to changes in Nyquist, this plug-in is only available for recent versions of Audacity 1.3
Please try it and leave your comments and suggestions.

Steve:
Very nice! But at least two outstanding issues. Here’s how I started, with two tone tracks, each 30 seconds, and offset an arbitrary amount.
xfade1.png
Here’s a zoom in on where the fade in of the second track will be complete:
xfade2.png
Now I do an x-fade with +0.5 start, -0.5 end, 0 and -96.
xfade3.png

  1. the length of track 1 has been reduced by 9 samples

  2. something nasty has happened at the end of the fade-in of track 2 - it looks like it has suddenly faded to zero.

– Bill

Rats - I thought I’d fixed that :smiley:

Thanks for the feedback Bill, both issues should be fixed now.
xfade.ny.zip (2.11 KB)

Much better now.

– Bill

Probably worth mentioning;

There is a slight glitch in Audacity Nyquist that can sometimes cause a “click” when tracks are mixed down even if waveforms match up seamlessly.

With current implementation, if only part of a track is being processed, Nyquist plug-ins will sometimes split the track at the ends of the selection. This will typically occur if the selected region starts or ends at the end of an audio clip (as is usually the case when using the “crossfade in/out” effects or this new X-fade effect). Although the tracks will play seamlessly, if the tracks are mixed down there may be one odd sample at the “split” point that is at zero and cause a click.

The workaround to avoid this is to “join” the split sections before mixdown, either by clicking on the split point with the selection tool, or selecting the track and pressing Ctrl+J.

Would a more simple version (less options) be preferable?

Moved to Audio processing section from Adding Features …

WC

Moved to New Nyquist Plug-ins

The latest version of this plugin has been added to Audacity 2.1