Merging music tracks

[mks3169]

Can anyone help me on figuring out how to merge tracks with cross fading? I used V5 with Windows XP merging tracks with cross fading for our church choir to create a music medley. Now I have moved onto Vista. Version 5 is not compatable. Any suggestions???

[Riches]

Can anyone help me on figuring out how to merge tracks with cross fading? I used V5 with Windows XP merging tracks with cross fading for our church choir to create a music medley. Now I have moved onto Vista. Version 5 is not compatable. Any suggestions???

 

 

Keep in mind that the crossfade for ECD9 is flawed. ECD5 did it perfectly, but ECD9 can't do it right at all. If you want a straight crossFADE (one track fades OUT while the other fades IN), it'll work just fine. But if you want to do PROPER crossfading (ie one track fades out, the other has a hard start... neither track fades but you want to cross them anyways... etc. etc...)... this does NOT work properly at all in ECD9. The second traacks will fade IN no matter whether you want it to or not. Roxio purposefully messed up this feature, which worked so well in earlier versions, due to the MINISCULE chance of audio clipping in the crossfade section of the transition. So nice of them to be so 'helpful'.

 

I think this was a bad move on their part as it has driven many people away from their product. Especially bad move because their's was one of the only products on the market that allowed a user full control over the various ways to transition two tracks. DJs, for instance, will find beat-mixing all but impossible with Roxio's built-in 'flaw'.

 

I suggest if you're looking for lots of control over your track transitions, use the Sound Editor, like the above poster suggested. You can actually have complete control, but the learning curve is a little high. I had some patience with it and use it all the time now. In fact, if I had my way, I would uninstall every other aspect of this bloated program and use nothing but the Sound Editor!

 

-Drude

[jeanrosenfeld]

In EMC 9, Sound Editor allows you to mix/merge sound files. By suitable positioning of the files on the tracks timeline (one layer for each track) and adjusting the volume line of each track you can get any kind of cross fading you want. There are also built in options for fade in and fade out that do the volume adjusting for you (linear increase/decrease of selected section). Then export the mix to a new file. I don't know what the limit is for the number of layers, but it is certainly greater than 6. In fact for simple sequential play with cross fading you really only need two layers, placing the sound files with required overlaps alternately on layers 1 and 2.

 

Or if you want to create an Audio CD with separate tracks rather than a new merged file, you can use MusicDisk creator, which also has cross fading options.

 

I don't have Vista, but as I understand it EMC 9.1 is Vista certified (people with v 9 are awaiting a patch to resolve some issues: see the Vista board for details; but I think Sound Editor or Music disc creator are not affected.

[jeanrosenfeld]

As you say the ostensible reason for the change is to avoid the possibility of clipping in the transition section (if the sum of the two waves exceeds the maximum level). I don't think that is a minuscule possibility; it depends, obviously on the sound levels at the end/beginning of the overlapping tracks. If each is close to the maximum then clipping is very likely to occur if you don't fade in the second track whilst the first is fading out. But in Sound Editor that can be avoided by using the various controls (e.g. set each layer to play at 50%, which in fact is the default setting). Thanks for making the point, though, as I should have mentioned the need to check that.