CD burning with overlap?

Harbinger · August 17, 2010, 20:28:09

I am presently trying to burn some of Tassel of Blue's audio CDs, but i thought i heard, heard of, or read somewhere that you can burn SEPARATE tracks so that they overlap. In essence, you could continuously string together a series of songs. I know foobar2000 can overlap the playback with crossfading, but what we're looking to do is join together the last beat of one song, with the first beat of the next, even while the first song fades (perhaps with an ending note), like a DJ mix. But the object is to keep the songs separate, in case a listener wants to extract one track by itself.

Anyone know of such a feature, and what software would have it? Or is it impossible and i'm off my rocker?

Saga Musix · August 17, 2010, 20:40:57

I'm not aware of a definition of crossfading in the red book standard, so I'm rather sure that there's no standardized way of providing crossfading on CDs. It's up to the players to supply such a feature, but I'm not aware of any hardware player that can do this.

Rakib · August 17, 2010, 21:36:14

Ah, yes remember that function, when I was copying dj-mixed cd's in the 90's. Dj Tiesto's Magik series was heavely copyied. But it's been a long time since my last time I burned a CD, but isn't it just to set the gap to 0 sec in the cd burning software?

Try this software
http://cdburnerxp.se/

QuoteKey Features
burn all kinds of discs
audio-CDs with or without gaps between tracks

Saga Musix · August 17, 2010, 21:42:47

I think that's not quite what he wants, though. gapless != crossfade. gapless is a 0 seconds crossfade, one could say. gapless tracks are of course possible and most cd players support that, but crossfade is not. But CDBXP is of course always a good recommendation to use.

Rakib · August 17, 2010, 22:17:53

Hmm I missread, so he wants crossfade. I can only think of that you use a dj-mixing software and do the mix there and it will save as seperately wave files for you to burn.

psishock · August 17, 2010, 23:34:54

Making a premixed crossfaded album may not be the best idea.

While it may have the unbroken flow, if someone wants to listen to a particular song(s) over and over, he would be also forced to listen to the parts of the crossfading songs before/after the chosen one. Also the good impact, of the (calm) intro/ending is lost in each songs that way.

The best option would be to setup the player for crossfading playback, if a person wants to listen to songs with the unbroken flow. Of course this will also have some disadvantages, compared to a proper, human controlled "dj mixing". The beat may go offbeat, and the bpm could also go unmatched, so there is a strong possibility that the results wont be pretty, when the crossfading scene hits in.

just my 2 cents.

LPChip · August 18, 2010, 07:19:16

If you still want to do this, this is how you should proceed:

First load in all your songs in a wave editor that is capable of creating the desired transitions (you could also mix the songs together to 1 song if it works better)

Once you have it sound like you want in 1 huge wavefile, split this wavefile with all the transitions in it to seperate wavetracks.

Load these wavefiles in an audio cd burning application and make sure that you remove the 2 second delay between audio tracks. Nero can do this, but there must be other software that can do this too.

In nero, you must select all the audio tracks, right click, choose properties, and there you can select something like transition delay or so, or 2 seconds silence. Not sure what the option is called. I used this years ago.

Then you burn the disc.

Saga Musix · August 18, 2010, 07:22:13

I think you missed the point again. He wants "conditional" crossfading, meaning that it is not audible if a track is selected manually. Again, this is not possible with standard red book CDs.

Still, if the tunes are similar enough, a skilled DJ can put them together so that they sound like one big track, but they still sound "normal" when being listened to separately. Without crossfading of course, but with perfect beat matching and similar enough tracks.

Harbinger · September 21, 2010, 19:38:22

Came up with a decent workaround to solve my problem...

For those songs that fade in/lead in to each other, i can create a separate audio track (albeit quite short), which contains the crossfade material. With a little engineering work and gapless recording, i can set it up so that one CD track ends on a beat, the bridge track is immediately jumped to, and this introduces the next track on a beat of its own. This will allow the user to rip a track he likes, and it will have a clean intro and outro (altho maybe not necessarily the ending that was originally intended by the author). So the playlist might look like this:

Code Select

...
3. Culmination          5:04
4. (bridge 2)            :16
5. Panorama             6:00
...

I could possibly put the regular song endings on the CD, but while i would want them to be accessible to the user, i don't want them to be an official CD track that a player would go to. Anyone know if audio files can be placed on a regular CD image but can be forced to be skipped if the CD is played thru?

LPChip · September 21, 2010, 19:52:34

I don't think its possible to make the cd player skip a track if it otherwise has to have access to it.

I do know that (unless you have an old cd player) the first track can be skipped if it seems to be a data cd (so you get a mixed mode cd). This data part could be played by a pc and could have wave files or mp3's.

But I suppose the best way to get this, is to create 2 editions of the cd. One that has everything mixed together, and one that has all the individual tracks. If you have enough room on the cd to have both, I would first do the looped part, and then the same but with separate tracks.

If you go for the last option, you might want to add the bridging part to the previous track. For the recording it wouldn't be much of a difference, except that it would play differently if on looped, but you wouldn't want to set those tracks on looped, but take the other normal tracks.

Harbinger · September 28, 2010, 16:26:23

Yes, that's what we've been forced to do until the technology catches up. We make a gapless mix version of the EDM, that a DJ might play. We also have a sort of "vinyl" mix in which each song has its own track. For sharing we also make a data disc with MP3s and all the liner notes and images.