Overlapping music

[j_spencer]

Basically, as I have a few tracks on my project, I'm trying to overlap them. So when one track is fading out the next one is simulataneously fading in, the point being to make sure there is never an absence of music. Now it won't let me overlap music on the music timeline, so to counter this, I put one track on the music timeline, then another on the voice timeline. The problem is I can't split audio from the video timeline when there is music in the voice timeline (it says "there is already a clip in the voice track"). So how do I overlap music and at the same time seperate audio from the video timeline?

If you read through this a few times it begins to make sense I promise!

Thanks.

Jamie.

[Ron P.]

With VS there is a problem when you are needing more then 2 separate audio tracks. However there are a couple of workarounds.

1. You can use a third party audio editor, like Audacity, to create your music track. Then insert that into VS. This would leave one track free for splitting the audio from the video.
2. This is a wild workaround. Place a duplicate of your video track into one of the video overlay tracks. Then resize the video so that it is real, real small, and drag it off to one corner, outside the title safe area, and you could set the transparency to 100%, just to ensure it can not be seen. Now you should still have the audio for the video, on another track. Of course mute the audio on the main video track. Essentially when you "split" the audio, muting is all that occurs anyway.

[DVDDoug]

Using an external audio editor, it will be tricky to keep the audio and video in sync. You will have to choose the exact same audio and video edit-points and exactly match the audio crossfade-duration to the video transitions. (Or, you can use a different duration if you calculate and compensate correctly.)

If this is background music, and the sync doesn't matter, everything should be OK.

I've used an external audio editor several times, and I've never had any problems. But, I've always been very careful to avoid any audio edits that change the length or timing of the audio file.

I wonder if this is something Ulead Media Studio Pro can handle better...?

[Ron P.]

With MSP, you can have 99 audio tracks, so yes it does handle this much better.

[j_spencer]

Thanks guys. Much appreciated.