Mixing Crossfading Conversion Utility?

[jtbse]

Newbie here...sorry if this has been answered in other posts (didn't quite find it when searching).

I'm wondering if any of you know of some utility that might allow me to combine several AAC (.m4a) tracks into a single file with cross fading between the tracks.

I wouldn't have ever thought I needed to do such a thing, since I normally consider cross fading to be a function of the player in question (iPod limitations aside ). But unfortunately I've converted separate tracks from some vinyl albums (e.g. Beatles - Sgt Pepper's...) and ripped some CDs (e.g. Pink Floyd The Wall), that when played in their entirety really need to be cross faded. It's all fine and good if I play from standard WinAmp library or whatever player with cross fading features turned on, but not so good on my iPod or when streaming.

I know that with WinAmp, I could just play through the wave writer plugin with cross fading dsp turned on, but I'm trying to avoid converting from AAC (lossy) to WAV (lossless) and back to AAC (lossy). I guess I could also just re-rip the CDs in WAV or re-record the vinyl and add the cross fading before converting, but that's all a lot of work! :o

Anyone know a better way?

Thanks in advance.

jtbse

[LtData]

Re: Mixing Crossfading Conversion Utility?

I know Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/) combines tracks, but I'm not sure about the crossfading part.

[jtbse]

Re: Mixing Crossfading Conversion Utility?

Woo Hoo! Music Converter and Power Pack to the rescue! :smile2:

I think maybe I figured this one out.

I'm thinking...convert the .m4a's to .aac with Power Pack DSP to fade in/out (and maybe trim, but I don't know how much). Then combine the .aac's to a single file with a command like "copy /b file1.aac+file2.aac file3.aac" Then convert the single file back to .m4a.

Only question I have, is....would I experience additional loss by going .m4a to .aac and back to .m4a? It's just a container change and removal of tags right?

Any thoughts?

jtbse

[LtData]

Re: Mixing Crossfading Conversion Utility?

Not if you use the container changing codec, no. That is a lossless change. And you don't lose the tags, except when you combine them.

And, out of my curiosity, what is copy /b?

[jtbse]

Re: Mixing Crossfading Conversion Utility?

Cool.

"copy /b" means copy binary (not ascii). If you append multiple files with a command like "copy file1+file2 file3", Windows/DOS assumes you want file3 to be ascii. Without the /b switch when I was trying to append the files I was getting 2 4MB files combined into a single .5MB (unplayable of course). The /b switch took care of that little problem.

Thanks for the help LtData!

[gameplaya15143]

Re: Mixing Crossfading Conversion Utility?

use the sqrsoft advanced crossfading diskwriter output plugin for winamp

im not sure if it can do single file output (havent used it in forever)
if not, then just run them back through winamp with the nullsoft diskwriter in singlefile mode

easiest way i know of

or in audacity: project, import audio
(convert your aac files to wav first)
then use fadein and fade out.. timeshift, etc.

[jtbse]

Re: Mixing Crossfading Conversion Utility?

use the sqrsoft advanced crossfading diskwriter output plugin for winamp

im not sure if it can do single file output (havent used it in forever)
if not, then just run them back through winamp with the nullsoft diskwriter in singlefile mode

easiest way i know of

or in audacity: project, import audio
(convert your aac files to wav first)
then use fadein and fade out.. timeshift, etc.

Thanks for the info gameplaya15143. I'll certainly check out the sqrsoft plugin (have only used the wave output in the past). I was trying to figure out how to do this without converting lossy to lossless and back to lossy, but that's starting to look like it's not possible.

Turns out that the steps I outlined before don't really work :( It seems that trying to append multiple .aac files with a copy command doesn't create a playable file with all of the material. The file is the correct size, but only the first track plays...(probably because of an end-of-file marker or something that doesn't get taken out). Also, I couldn't quite get the dbPowerAmp Powerpack DSPs to do what I thought they would; possibly since I wasn't really encoding (?) , but just extracting .aac data from the m4a container.

So I guess the choices are to convert to wav and use audacity or some other wave editor to append and combine things, or go back to the original source material, create wav and edit before converting.

Thanks for the feedback!

jtbse