Smarter Crossfade

[nosaj72]

I'm loving MusicBee, but the only thing I really miss from iTunes is its crossfading. iTunes seems to detect if the ending song is fading out or not, and adjusts the start of the next song accordingly. Its not perfect, but most of the time, it does a good job of switching songs like a radio station would. Musicbee seems to fade out the ending song at the fadeout time no matter what.

I've tried getting the winamp plug-in from SqrSoft to work, but it is very flaky and messes up the waveform display and the next song notifications (they are about 10-15 seconds ahead of what you are hearing).

[Steven]

it sounds like you want to tick the Player preference "remove starting and ending silence"

[nosaj72]

OK, I've played around with that setting, in combination with different crossfade times, and it does make it better in some cases. I was having a hard time thinking of how to explain what I am trying to say, but a found a post from a forum for an Android music app that describes it perfectly, so I will quote...

I want to join the request for more advanced crossfading features. In fact only one feature, the "real" feature - volume based crossfade.

Having background in radio broadcasting, my two cents on the topic is that the real cross fade rarely requires manipulating the volume levels - this will often mutilate the ending of a song (imagine a song which ends abruptly by design, also known as "cut" or "cold" ending). In such a case you want to have very short overlap.

A real radio crossfade in fact requires deciding WHEN to start playback of the next song so the overlap harmonizes with the ending of the previous song.

That said, it is very difficult to build an algorithm which understands how to do that.

The best I've seen so far is a plugin for Winamp where you configure two parameters:
1. At what volume level (dB) of the PREVIOUS song should the NEXT song kick in (remember, no fading up or down for any of the songs).
2. What should be the maximum overlap (ms) ensuring that the volume trigger does not go off in the middle of a song during a quiet moment. Example if the volume drops but the song has another 2 minutes to go, the next song playback will not start because the maximum overlap is set to 6 seconds for example.

Two additional features that will make the cross-fader rock-solid:
3. Always apply gap killer for both songs - there should be no silence at the end and the beginning of songs. You already have it, so tick.
4. Pre-processing the volumes of all songs in order to make sure that the crossfader compares apples with apples.

This simple algorithm works in 99% of the cases and the effect is amazing

[Chrisjockey]

It is an old topic but i'm really surprised crossfade radio stile is not solved properly still. Crossfade should be made by analyzing sound level of the last seconds of a song.

SQRsoft made the best plugin years ago, pity its not working in MusicBee

This is what they said about how it works:

The crossfade is made by analyzing sound level of the last seconds of the song to determine the best mix point, applying the level envelope curves to the beginning and end of the tracks.You can set different crossfading parameters for normal crossfade on track end and when you skip the track. This includes the mixing length so you can set the mix to 10%, 20%, etc.
This plugin includes a Gap Killer that eliminates the silence or any sound bellow the trigger level, this is applied to the start and end of the track.
This plugin also includes format converter that gets activated when you try to mix two songs with different bits per sample, sample rate or number of channels. The sample converter will automatically change the track to the format selected in the "Open wave device as...".