Section 44. Create Crossfades Between Songs


44. Create Crossfades Between Songs

Before You Begin

See Also

Import a Music CD into iTunes

Auto-Level Song Volumes

Find and Play Music in iTunes

 


iTunes gives you access to certain audio effects that greatly enhance the atmosphere and professional sound of your music as you play it from your Library or playlists. One of these features is crossfading. Crossfading eliminates the gap that's sometimes audible between tracks as iTunes reads the new file from the disk. Perhaps most importantly, crossfading simply sounds cool, like something you would hear on the radio.

Key Terms

Crossfading Having one track fade out at its end; the next track begins as the previous one is still fading.


You enable crossfading with a check box and use a slider that determines how long the fade-out effect should last. When it's active, crossfading applies to playback in any music source, including the Library, playlists, or the Party Shuffle playlist.

Note

Crossfading is not available on the iPod, nor does it work with podcasts or videos.


Create Crossfades Between Songs


Open the Playback Preferences

Open the iTunes Preferences window. (Choose iTunes, Preferences on the Mac; choose Edit, Preferences in Windows.) Click the Playback tab.

Enable Crossfading

Enable the Crossfade playback check box. This check box turns on the crossfading feature but leaves the crossfade length set at zero. That way, theoretically no change should be audible if you test the playback now (although in some cases, iTunes loads the upcoming track ahead of time, eliminating the pause between tracks that can sometimes result from slow disk access speeds).

Configure the Length of the Crossfade Effect

Use the Crossfade playback slider to specify a number of seconds for the crossfade effectanything from 0 to 12 seconds. You can experiment with this setting, trying a few different lengths until you see what's right for you. A good starting point is to set the slider to 6 seconds, the middle of the scale, and test it by playing your music and letting one song give way to the next with a smooth fade-out and the next song's overlapping entry.

Eliminate the Gap Between Tracks

Particularly if your computer has slow hard disk access performance, you might notice a brief gap between tracks as iTunes jumps from one song to the next during playback. You can mitigate this behavior using the crossfade feature. Simply move the slider almost all the way to the left. The slider slips into détentes at each full second, so try it at 1 second. This is probably enough to cover up any potential inter-track gaps. If so, try moving the slider back to 0; the crossfade feature is still enabled, so the next track might be loaded ahead of time from the disk, which tends by itself to get rid of the gap.




iPod + iTunes for Windows and Mac in a Snap
iPod + iTunes for Windows and Mac in a Snap (2nd Edition)
ISBN: 0672328992
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 150
Authors: Brian Tiemann

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