please help me understand (montage) crossfades & markers / track IDs

i remain confused about how WL (9, pro) manages crossfades in the montage in relation to track IDs

scenario:
i drag an album’s worth of tracks into the montage, use my preset in CD WIZARD to space them by 2 seconds and make my IDs (i have “create markers at clip boundaries” checked, do not have use SPLICE MARKERS or “create markers at crossfade points” (at this stage, because i haven’t yet made crossfades))

then, as i go in to edit individual gaps between tracks, if the client has requested some crossfades, i manually drag those and edit the fades and such.

what happens at this point though, is that up in the CD window my END and LENGTH points on those tracks have turned into dashes - instead of times and… if i recall correctly, the tracks won’t properly export or burn to DDP…

if i go in and move the track START marker of the fading-in track to be AFTER the END marker of the fading out track, my END and LENGTH times pop into existence again…

but, what if i want the track start ID to be at the beginning of the fade in… instead of at the end?

i’ve managed to get by all these times, but more out of guessing and confusion… i’d really like to know what is going on so i can properly do what i need to do.

i’m still somewhat new to WL, so it’s all part of the learning curve.

so my question is… how do i create crossfades correctly? without messing up the END and LENGTH times?

thanks!

If you use CD track splice markers instead of separate end/start markers, it will but much simpler. Even when an album has no crossfades or overlaps, I use CD track splice markers because it makes everything more simple and clear.

forgot to upload the screen grab, which i just did…

in this case, you can see the waveforms of track 9 and 10 at the bottom overlapping… yet, up top, the dashes did NOT appear… yet they did on some of the other track overlaps…

adding to my confusion…

Change the start marker into a splice marker. Delete the end marker in the marker list. The program I used to use didn’t have splice markers. If there was a start marker and no end marker, the start marker acted as a splice marker always. Logically and technically it worked fine under all circumstances.

i think you suggested i do this before, justin, now that i think about it… for some reason the preset i used in my Wizard pull-down did not have SPLICES checked…

i just re-did the montage with splices and i’m not having that overlap timing issue anymore

thanks!

so is that basically all i should worry about at this point? seems to work fine…

Yes, other than the start marker at the very beginning of the montage, and the end marker at the very end of the montage, just use a CD track splice marker to easily define when each track ends and the next one starts.

In the heyday of the CD, some people liked to have a pregap between songs (negative time) and you can maybe find some special cases for it today but because of how digital distribution works, it’s mostly common to have a sharp end and start for each track.

Just place the CD track splice marker where you want the track to change and that’s it.

My CD Wizard default preset is always set to use CD Track Splice makers regardless of tracks overlapping or not. To me, it just simplifies everything and is also easier to look at.