Here’s a new cross-fading effect designed to produce quick and easy “DJ” style cross-fades.
No instructions yet, but I’ve made a little demo video: http://youtu.be/zKbWBSorgTw
Features:
Dead easy to use - just trim and overlap your tracks as required, then apply the effect.
The crossfade is a “medium cut” style, but no worrying about the mix clipping thanks to the built-in limiter.
Limitations:
The effect should always be applied to 2 tracks at the same time:
The upper track comes before the lower track.
If an odd number of tracks are processed, the effect will get out of sync and a weird mix will occur in the upper track instead of silence. If this occurs the effect will need to be reset.
How to reset the effect:
Apply the effect to part of 1 track only (Ctrl+Z to Undo). The effect is now reset.
Comments, feedback and suggested improvements are very welcome.
If you use this plug-in please say something, even if only to offer encouragement for more plug-ins. DJ-EZX-fade.ny (3.72 KB)
I thought it was broken until I figured that the track fading out had to be the upper one.
I find it a bit “lumpy” but maybe this is not surprising as I like to hear a fair amount of what is being faded in right from the start of the cross fade.
One song I was fading into happened to be such that the voices came in about two-thirds through the cross-faded region. Preceding the voices, the music was loud instruments then a bit softer instruments. In the result, the audio proportions in the cross faded region sound something like this:
1st third 2nd third Final third
1st track 75% 65% 10%
2nd track 25% 35% 90%
Also the “2nd third” sounded more like a mid fade loss of level than I expected, even though the content of the second track is a little quieter there.
Maybe a case where I picked a difficult example which was better done manually.
I’m a bit surprised that you’re not getting that. The “fade curve” that is used in this fade is the “Cross Fade In” / “Cross Fade Out” effect (as currently shipped in Audacity).
Yes please, I’d be interested to have a look / listen.
For “difficult” material, there is probably no alternative to doing it manually. This effect is really just intended for quick and easy cross-fading of pop/dance/club mix type of material.
It’s rather a difficult task to blend the two tracks. The transition is fairly long (6 s?) and the beats do not fit very well.
However, Ive tried my Chain-it-up plug-in and had good results at a transition time of about two s and a double S crossfade.
Also linear and cosine crossfades returned satisfying results (correction full up to equal power, transition 6 s and afterwards second track moved slightly to the right).
The trick is to find the point where the two tracks are exactly on the beat (or musically off the beat).
In general, those who compile professional sampler CDs try to match the songs in respect to beat and harmonic content. Often a song is transposed and changed in tempo to reach this goal. It sometimes happens that I successfully have transcribed a song and then must perceive that the key doesn’t fit over such a “Best of” version.
It would be great to have a real DJ-crossfade, beat and harmony-detection inclusive.
Meanwhile, Steve’s effect is a fast way to produce a cross-fade (if your sighted at least).
That is just the kind of example that I was thinking about in my most recent note on the wiki.
As Robert describes, a “DJ style” cross-fade only really works when cross-fading music with is similar tempo and related (or the same) key. These are the cases where you really want to avoid a dip in perceived loudness. Your example is a clear contrast to that, and for cross-fading songs with such dissimilar rhythm I would aim for a marked dip in the “loudness”, possibly by using linear fades, or as in this example using an “S-curve” with the mid-fade taken down just a touch. (I’d probably go for a somewhat shorter crossfade myself, but I’ve kept it close to what you labelled). london.zip (540 KB)
