Welcome, this is your tutorial on cross fades in Audacity. So let me first open my files. Import Bumblebee. Then import audio and lets’ do this guitar low pass. Yes, I will make a copy of this before editing.

OK, good. I have my two files here. My idea is to fade out one file into the other. So the first thing I will need to do is to arrange the two tracks so I am going to click this time shift tool and I would really like it to be so this part fades into this part here. OK, very good. Now let me select my cursor. I am going to select this part of the file. That is good. See right now this grey patch is only in the upper file. I really need to select down here as well. I select down there and drag up so it is over both tracks. Now you can see that they are both greyed out. Then you can make an adjustment here. That was too much. I like that. OK. That is looking pretty good.

OK, so I am going to Effect and Crossfade Tracks. Let’s see what happens. Notice that I have all different ones (fades) I can do. I am just going to use this Power 1 here.


Oops, that is not what I wanted. It made the lower track go from less volume to more volume and the upper track go from more volume to less volume. Actually I wanted it the other way around.  I wanted the guitar to fade into the other track.
OK so if I press control-z that undoes it. I realize my mistake! I have to have the lower track on top. So I am going to click on it and drag it up. Here we go, OK!
So the one I want to fade into the other has to be on the top. Let me do again all of this selecting. OK and then I have to drag down there. I want to cross fade just like that. OK, good. So let’s try that again. Crossfade Tracks; select that. And OK. Now why didn’t it fade this lower one very much? Oh, it did fade it some. I see. OK let’s add that effect again.
I tell you what. Let me first play this without the fade.

OK, so you can see that they overlap. Now with the crossfade on it..Crossfade Tracks. Let’s see how this Power 1 works. Alright.

It didn’t quite crossfade as much as I wanted. It didn’t quite crossfade as much as I like it to. I liked the way this (upper track) faded out but I don’t like the way that (lower track) faded. So let’s use the envelope tool  and click here and click there. Let’s make more of this coming in here. Alright? Let’s see how that works better. That is more to my liking. Let’s try again.

No, no, let’s go back here. Come on, come on, you can do it. There we go, OK.

Alright, so this is still a little bit too (loud) so I clicked on this tool again. Let’s bring this down a little bit here—no I am going to leave that alone. Let me put another dot here and then pull this down. Yes, much more like that. OK. Let’s give that a try and see if that gives the effect we wanted.
Some of this in Audacity is just that you have to fool around a little bit to get the effect you want.

That’s it! That’s the effect I wanted. The crossfade by itself didn’t get me the effect I wanted because this (bottom) track was so much louder than the other one. I wanted one to fade out and the other to fade in.
So that is just a demonstration of crossfade and of course you can use this Envelope tool to further touch up things in Audacity. You definitely will want to be able to fade in from one track to another and make a nice transition.