Newbie help: crossfade in montage

I just moved up to Elements 7 from Audacity. I’m having trouble figuring out how to do really basic things, and “Help” is often not much help. Here’s a particular task that should be easy:

I wish to splice two different recordings of the same performance (one containing the first part, the other containing the second part), crossfading the transition over a segment of several seconds. Using the audio editor, I cut off the end of the first file, with the cut at the end of the planned crossfade, and then cut off the beginning of the second, with the cut at the beginning of the planned crossfade. I then loaded both into a montage and moved them so that they are in the right places, marking either side of the planned crossfade with markers.

Now… what? I can’t figure out how to select the segment between the two markers and apply a crossfade.

Many thanks in advance for illumination!

In the Audio File editior, you could try “Edit > Paste with XFade”

But you will certainly better like the Audio Montage: just split a clip and move the parts.

How do I do that, exactly? I feel like the proverbial monkey pounding randomly on a typewriter–the UI just doesn’t make sense to me yet.

  • Press on the Audio Montage icon for 1/2 a second, and select New…
  • Drag and drop the audio file onto the new window.
  • Put the cursor where you like to split, and press “S”.
    Now you see 2 parts… point & drag…

Thanks! It worked. My problem (coming from Audacity) is that I had the two parts in the montage as separate tracks, one above the other. Now that I have figured this out, I agree that it is a vast improvement! :slight_smile:

This may be harder to get to work than you expect! I have a crossfade of two seconds in one of the records I’ve produced, and the built-in crossfades were completely unsuitable - in fact, I ended up editing the volume envelopes in the two clips manually until I got what was required (and that was just crossfading a single note held on a double-bass…).

Paul

Yes, I’ve suffered through that process, too. This one was pretty easy because it was a combination of a high-quality board recording and a poor audience recording, so fine tonal considerations weren’t in the picture. It was more a question of making the crossfade long enough to ease the pain of the transition, without making it any longer than necessary. The automatic crossfade option worked fine for this.