Crossfades

[rkohlbeck]

HI - I noticed back in 2004 someone wrote in about having the capability to crossfade tracks into each other.. Roxio has this and is really nice especially if you are a film composer and want to blend the cues seamlessy between each other and have a nice overlap feature where you can control the seconds of crossfade...

have you given any thought to making this into a upgrade in 2010.

Just trying to eliminate gaps on the cd without monkeying around with Dsp etc..

Just think this is an interesting idea especially seeing as high end and techinical your whole program is.

Please advise.. thank you

[xoas]

Re: Crossfades

With the existing version of dBpowerAMP Refernce with CD Writer 3 you should be able to use CD Writer to create a gapless audio CD without any problem and if you add tracks to the CD from dBpowerAMP Music Converter you should be able to use the fade DSP to the beginning and/or end of each track to create a cross-fade effect (although this stops short of being a true crossfade). The amount of fade is adjustable.

Although using the DSP may seem clunky, I believe that once you set a DSP for converting from a particular format that DSP will be automatically applied for each successive track converted to that output format until or unless you change or remove the DSP. So if you are converting mp3 files to gapless standard audio CD and set the fade DSP for the first file, every other audio track you add to that CD will also have the fade DSP applied unless you remove it, even if you add an ogg file or flac file to the CD. Once you remove the DSP, it does stay removed for that output format unless you add it back. (Likewise, if you convert an mp3 file to audio CD with the fade effect and then use Music Converter to convert the same track to wave, you will not automatically get the fade DSP, you will have to set it.)

You can add fade to the tracks of a music data CD (say an mp3 disk or wma disk). By definition these should be gapless and otherwise the same principles apply.

I would add that just because a CD is technically gapless is not a guarantee that the CD player may not add a gap on playback. But that is not CD Writer's or Music Converter's fault, it is the players. Cue sheet support is currently (I believe) in beta testing and is the one area where I believe there is definitely more progress to be made. Not being very technical myself it is my guess that true cue sheet support would be needed if you wanted to have a true cross fade between tracks without having to rip the disk as a single track and even then I am not sure how well this would work for situations where you do not play tracks back in order (I believe the player would have to create the crossfade otherwise the fading out track would logically seem to have fading in information from the track that followed it in the rip and the fade in for the next track would have fade out from the track before it. But I could be mistaken about how this is supposed to work).

Anyway, I do think CD Writer 3 is closer to the capabilities you appear to be asking about than you mioght think.

Best wishes,
Bill