Crossfading When Editing Audio

Crossfading is easy and important.

Here’s a good description of crossfading from this article at Sweetwater:

Amateur recordings are chock-full of abrupt volume changes, audible clicks, and unnatural transitions. These unwanted effects are caused by discontinuous waveforms — a common consequence of splicing audio clips together. So how do you prevent these? You could make all your cuts at zero-crossing points (during moments of silence), but that’s not always practical or possible, and it’s definitely time-consuming. So how do you make smooth edits? That’s where crossfading comes in.

Crossfading creates a seamless transition from one audio clip to another using a quick overlapping fade-out and fade-in. And it’s easy — start by overlapping the end of the earlier audio clip with the beginning of the later one. Apply a crossfade of about 10ms (this is program dependent, so it varies depending on whether you’re editing drums or vocals, for instance) so that the earlier item fades out at the exact same time that the later item fades in. Then adjust the crossfade duration until it sounds right. This will create a clean transition rather than a jarring one and avoid unpleasant sonic artifacts. Many DAWs include a function that automatically creates crossfades when you overlap audio clips.

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