With previous versions (using Creator Classic) I had a great deal of flexibility when it came to overlapping music tracks on a mix CD. My personal preference was to avoid fading in and fading out of the adjoining tracks. I picked an appropriate number of seconds (usually 4-5) and let the tracks overlap. When listening to this you could actually hear both tracks at the same time. I relied on the natural fading of the recorded tracks themselves. The previous track tailed off as the next track started off. Sometimes I would have to fade the previous track out slightly or fade the next track in. When this happened I could choose exactly how I wanted this to work - eg, fade last 3 seconds of previous track and first 2 seconds of next track.

Where has all this excellent functionality disappeared to. The new transitions facility is very limited. I can only listen to a split second of the previous track before the next track kicks in. The ability to overlap seems to have disappeared altogether. I thought this was because I was not using fade out/fade in each time. I tried this and it didn't seem too bad when I listened to the tracks on my PC (not using the transition preview but by playing the previous track, skipping to near the end of it and letting the next track start). I could live with the fade in and fade out and could see the logic in having it. However when I burned a CD - the overlap was gone! The tracks still faded out and in but no overlap!!

Am I being stupid or is this a known problem? I use EMC almost exclusively for creating CD's and am not asking for anything I couldn't do in previous versions. Anybody got any thoughts? I know from answers to previous posts that I could probably install 7 alongside 8 - but this seems like overkill. If there is no way of doing what I want in 8, do you know if this has been sorted out for version 9?

JimCha, I'm pretty sure that V8 and V9 Music Disc Creator are pretty much the same. I have only V9 on my computer at this time but I checked to see what happened when I tried what you did. I was able to get an overlap on the music but, there is no way I know of of adjusting the overlap so that it is skewed more to one than the other. In this version, you may need to use more of an overlap than 5 second (2 1/2 each); start with something larger and reduce as desired. The following image shows 12 seconds but somewhere about 8 is right for the music I tested. I burned the music to a CD RW and it played with the overlap.

You didn't say what type of disc you were trying to make so I just chose a standard audio disc. See the image; perhaps it will give you more ideas.

sknis thanks for having a look at this for me. I've had a go at this with the longer overlaps and bringing the overlap down until I get roughly the right effect. The bottom line is that it seems to work sometimes and sometimes it doesn't. Occasionally it seems to fade when I haven't asked it to. On other occasions it seems to cut one or other of the songs off at the overlap point rather than overlapping. I even managed to get one case of the overlap seeming to work only to get an audible click in the middle of the overlap. It's got to the stage where I am loathe to even try overlapping anything because I simply can't rely on the results. Even when it sounds OK in the preview it often ends up not working on the finished CD. Unfortunately I think I will have to go back to version 7 and stay put there!! Very disappointing - but once again thanks anyway.

The non-fading overlap is something that Roxio is aware of. One of the developers got involved in one of the threads about that at one point, and I think it was pretty clear that restoring the ability to overlap songs with no fade-in/out was desireable. I hope they bring it back too.