How to insert fade-outs

Hi, I am new here,

I have Windows 10 and am running Audacity 3.0.5 I have a lot of mp3 tracks that go on and on and I want to create my own fade-outs. How is this done?

Also, is it possible to increase the playback volume of recorded tracks? Many have a low volume and you must turn the volume way up, then remember to turn it back down when the track ends or blow your speakers!

Any help or tips would be great! Thank you for your time.

J~

Fades - Audacity Manualhttps://youtu.be/gtIoten8GXQ?t=78


https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/amplify.html

  1. Select and delete any surplus audio that you want removed.
    See: Selecting Audio - the basics - Audacity Manual
    and: Edit - Audacity Manual

  2. Select the part that you want to fade

  3. Apply the “Fade Out” effect
    See: Fades - Audacity Manual
    Tip: Try both the “Linear” fade effect, and the “Studio Fade Out” effect.

  4. Export your edited track in whatever format you need
    See: https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/export.html

[u]Fade-out[/u]

If you want to shorten the tracks you’ll need to trim-off the part you don’t want before fading, otherwise the sound will come-back at the end of the fade-selection.

Also, is it possible to increase the playback volume of recorded tracks? Many have a low volume and you must turn the volume way up

You can run the Amplify or Normalize effect but there is a “catch”. The peaks are limited to 0dB (if you want to avoid clipping/distortion) and the peaks don’t correlate well with perceived loudness so you can sometimes have 0dB normalized/maximized tracks that “sound quiet”.

There are tools such as [u]MP3Gain[/u] or some players support [u]ReplayGain[/u] and these will even-out the volume of your music library. Apple has a similar feature called Sound Check. Note that since many quiet-sounding songs can’t be boosted without clipping, these tools use a target volume that lowers the volume of many/most tracks and some people don’t like that.

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A note about MP3 - As you may know MP3 is lossy compression (information is thrown-away to make the file smaller). When you open an MP3 in Audacity (or any “normal” audio editor it gets decompressed. If you then re-export as MP3 you are going through another generation of lossy compression and some “damage” does accumulate. You may not hear any quality loss but it’s something you should be aware of and you should try to minimize the number of times it’s re-compressed. There is a special-purpose editor called [u]MP3directCut[/u] that can do some limited editing without decompressing.

I am using Windows 10 and Audacity Ver. 3.1.2
It didn’t take too long to figure out how to select the part of the track I wanted to fade out. I opened up the track properly (IMPORT audio) then I highlighted it, and I clicked on it and chose Fade Out. I didn’t see an EXECUTE button. I saw export, which I did… and it exported the track at its ORIGINAL length, 4:55 instead of the desired 4:07 (yeah, BIG jump!)

What am I missing here? Thanks to Steve and Doug for replying…

Fading-in or fading-out doesn’t change the length. If you want to chop-off the end, select/highlight the part you want to remove and hit the “Del” key on your keyboard, or use Edit → Delete. It’s probably easier to delete the part you don’t want before fading.

Oh my God that seems dumb. I would think if I told it to fade out to zero it would know that I want it to end there! I would think that made sense and was set up to work that way. Maybe there is a reason for that, and it makes sense but not to me. LOL

Doug, I tried it and it worked like a charm. Thank you so much. Now I have a ton of tracks to edit. In the near future I may ask about taking two pieces of audio and splicing them together! One thing at a time though! Thanks again. Be Safe.