[ddots-l] Re: cross fading

  • From: "Dan Rugman" <danrugman@xxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <ddots-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Thu, 7 Dec 2006 08:30:54 -0000

Absolutely.  It sounds rediculous, but Sonar  can handle a crossfade of less 
than a millisecond, although I normally only make longer cross fades.  
I tend to use it when the material is too different to be simply spliced.

I didn't talk about this the other day but you can also crossfade between two 
tracks.  You just have to select both tracks and then carry on as if it was 
just one.  This is really useful for crossing between takes on different 
tracks, which are hopefully already aligned.


  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Phil Halton 
  To: ddots-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx 
  Sent: Saturday, December 02, 2006 1:51 AM
  Subject: [ddots-l] Re: cross fading


  Hey Dan,

  That's great-thanx.  Are you saying that one of the uses of this would be to 
smooth out "snaps&Pops" by, say, overlapping a splice by a few ticks or so and 
then cross-fading?

    ----- Original Message ----- 
    From: Dan Rugman 
    To: ddots-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx 
    Sent: Thursday, November 30, 2006 8:32 PM
    Subject: [ddots-l] cross fading


    Hi Neville and others,

    I'm really sorry.  I completely forgot to give you a description of cross 
fading as I promised all those months ago.  I was caught up in finishing up a 
couple of large scale pieces and I had several concerts to prepare for which 
made me go slightly insane.  I have vague memories of a week in France without 
a computer as well.

    I don't have time right now for a detail working through, that will have to 
wait until tomorrow morning but just for a laugh try this.

    1. Load up a long wave file onto a clean track and set the from and through 
times to points near the middle of the file.  

    2. Cut the material between the from and through times, making sure that 
you enable the delete whole option in the cut dialogue, this will ensure that 
everything after the cut will be moved over to fill in the gap, in other words 
to the from time.  This is essentially a splice.

    3. The next step is to select all the material which came after the cut.  
The from and through times will not have moved so you only have to hit control 
+ f10 to move the through time to the end of the file.  This will automatically 
select the rest of the track.

    4. Move the now time to a few measures before the from time so that you can 
hear what happens at the point where you made the cut.  At the moment you 
should just hear a sudden jump.  Now use the large nudge keys to move the 
material after the cut so that it overlaps that which came before.  Make the 
overlap really big, say a whole measure,  so that you can hear what happens 
next.  You're now ready to make the cross fade.

    5.  You need to select a portion of the track which includes the overlap.  
It doesn't need to be exact so you could just hit play and then f9 just before 
the overlap and f10 just after it.  You could even just select the whole track 
because there are no overlaps anywhere else.  Now just go to the crossfade 
dialogue in the audio submenu of the process menu.  The short cuts are alt+P 
then A then C.  The linear crossfade option should be highlighted which is what 
we want so just hit enter.

    6. Observe the amusing result.  If its not quite to your liking then you 
have two options.  The first is to change the position of the material after 
the cut, or change the actual cut itself.

    7. To change the position of the material you need to undo back to the 
first nudge.  To do this use the undo history.  The dialogues a bit misleading 
but what you need to do is move down to the last thing you want to undo and 
then go down one more.  This restores the file to the point immediately before 
the operation you wanted to undo.  After this just nudge the audio after the 
cut to a different and try the cross fade again.

    To change the cut itself just go even further back through the history.  It 
will be one below the cut, probably "insert audio".  This will put the cut 
material back and put the from and through times to the points they were at 
immediately before you made the cut.

    I know this sounds a little convaluted but if you Just try it out a few 
times you'll soon get the hang of it.  There are other more complicated things 
that you can do, like cross fading between different takes on different tracks 
but its not as bad as it sounds.

    If you really want to go into depth on this then I think the best thing I 
can do is either prepare a full length document outlining things clearly in a 
formal way, or to do an audio demo that I can send to you or upload somewhere.

    Hope all this makes sencse and that you get it to work,

    Dan

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