I just updated to audacity and love the new layout and features. I’m on a Mac and using version 4.0.0.262451609.
Two questions:
Overdub: I cannot find a menu item or setting anywhere that allows me to turn over dub on so that I can record while there’s already music in the other tracks, and have them be automatically muted. I was able to do this in audacity 3 and I simply can’t find it.
Crossfade: I was thrilled to see this was added, but my Crossfade doesn’t behave the way I expected. If I take two clips and put them up against each other, then select a portion of the overlap, and then choose Crossfade clips as the manual says), it merges them together, but drops the sound level of the second clip to exactly what the first clip ended on. Ideally I would just want to see Crossfade just by overlapping them (the way audition does it). Am I doing something wrong? It’s a bit bulky to have to cross fade this way, but I’m OK with it, if it works, but it doesn’t seem to work that way?
I apologize if someone addressed this somewhere. I did a search first, but was unable to find anything related to either one of these.
The Crossfade Clips effect requires that the two clips are butted up against each other and a selection is made of about same length in each clip spanning the two clips.
This works for me in Audacity 3 and Audacity 4.
You mention selecting “a portion of the overlap”. There is no overlap. Overlapping clips in Audacity 4 does not, as far as I can tell, enable one to crossfade them. What happens when you push a clip on top of another clip is that the “bottom” clip is truncated. You can see this if you immediately drag the clip back so it doesn’t overlap. Thus calling the Crossfade Clips effect merely tries to crossfade the current selection (whether it spans two clips or not).
[As an aside, one can crossfade within a clip. The effect doesn’t care if the selection spans two clips. It merely takes the selection, divides it in two equal parts and crossfades those two parts.]
Thanks for the quick response. I misspoke and indeed meant that they were abutted. And I did follow the procedure but again it didn’t work that way for me. What I described it did happen in which the extremely low volume of the previous clip made the following clip low volume as well.
However, however, I just did two other tests, one in which I just put two vocal tracks together and cross faded them, and it worked perfectly, and then I messed with the volume by using the clip gain function to bring the volume down to almost nothing on clip a, and when I did the test again, putting it up against clip B and fading enough of it that weird result didn’t happen. That may have been a fluke when I was messing around.
Unless it happens again, the cross fading is just peachy. Thanks again for the response.
Yes, that feature appears to be missing and I can’t find anything relating to AU4 when I search on Github for “overdub”.
I recall some talk about wanting to re-write Audacity’s underlying audio engine to better control latency, and that might be what is holding up an overdub function in AU3.
In the meantime, like so many others, I’d recommend sticking with Audacity 3 for now, until Audacity 4 has the features you need.
Thanks I may have to do that because when I record my podcast, it’s with the existing music in place so I’ll use audacity three until it becomes available or I can find it.
It’s really nice that they are two separate installations and you can bounce back-and-forth.