QuickStart: Digital Audio Editing
Pages: 1, 2

Fading Away Gracefully

One of the most important audio editing skills to master is volume fades, which help you transition between events without jarring your listeners. Here I'll cover fades in a musical context, using clips from Spencer Critchley's article "Country Music's Digital Surprise." Figures 6 and 7 show the clip before fading.

Fig 6: Audio, Pre-fade

Figure 6. I find that musical fadeouts sound best when they begin and end on downbeats. Here I've inserted markers to identify the beginning of the bars in this clip. I'm going to create a fade between Markers 2 and 3.

Fig 7. Pre-Fade

Figure 7. Here's the bar of music before applying the fade envelope.

The simplest type of fade is a straight line (Figure 8), so I usually start with that.

Fig. 8: Linear Fade

Figure 8. Here's the effect of a linear fadeout.

When you need to make a quick stop, as in a radio edit, the slow fade (Figure 9) can work well.

Fig. 9: Slow Fade

Figure 9. Here's the effect of a slow fadeout, which is good for a sudden transition.

When you're fading to silence and want to give the impression that the song will continue forever, a fast fadeout (Figure 10) is usually best.

Fig. 10: Fast Fadeout

Figure 10. The fast fadeout has an exponential curve, which often sounds more natural.

Often, extending the fade into the downbeat of the next bar is effective. Listen to these examples:

When you have time, a long, fast fade sounds great:

Another trick I use is to run the fade command twice, producing a steeper rolloff. With the last example, that causes the sound to end in the middle of the bar:

To pull it all together, here are several fades on the final version of the song. (You may want to turn down your speakers a bit.) I also created a rapid fade-in:

Popular Audio Editing Software

Adobe Audition (Win)

Audacity (free; Mac/Win/Linux)

BIAS Peak (Mac)

Digidesign Pro Tools (Mac, Win)

GoldWave (Win)

Sony Sound Forge (Win)

Steinberg WaveLab (Win)

Making Diamonds

The best way to learn audio editing is just to dive in and experiment. Imagine what the recording engineers who had to slice magnetic tape with razor blades to make their edits would have given for an Undo button! (Not to mention a visual representation of the sound.) You'll find a list of popular audio editing programs in the sidebar. Most offer free demos, and one is entirely free, so there's no reason to suffer with lumps of audio coal when you could be making gems. For more audio editing tips, see "Killer Interviewing Tips for Podcasters, Part 2."

David Battino is the audio editor for O’Reilly’s Digital Media site, the co-author of The Art of Digital Music, and on the steering committee for the Interactive Audio Special Interest Group (IASIG). He also writes, publishes, and performs Japanese kamishibai storycards.

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