Add fades to audio with the Audition waveform display

If you have audio that starts quite abruptly, and you'd like to add a fade, Audition makes this very, very easy. I've got a piece of music open here Simply Falling Mix.mp3. This is in the Assets folder with the other media. And if I just zoom in to the start, I'm just going to drag the end of the navigator here to zoom in, just position the playhead at the beginning. And if I press play, I'm pressing the spacebar here, you can hear, it kicks in pretty fast.
Now, it's quite a nice opening to a piece of music. But let's say in my creative genius I decide that I would rather it faded in. There's a couple of different ways of working this out. First of all, there's the super easy way. I know it's very, very subtle, but let me see if I can open another piece of music or another piece of audio just so you can see this.
Let's try the -maybe let's pick up this piece because it's quite at the beginning. So I've just opened up the speech_siren.wav audio in the Clean up folder. And you'll notice that where it's dark, I've got this square broken into 2 triangles one at the top left and one at the top right. And now I've pointed these out, you're going to spot them on every piece of audio you open.
And if I hover the mouse over this one, you can see it's called Fade In and this one's Fade Out. Now, I'm going to switch back to the Simply Falling Mix.mp3 track, because it's a bit more obvious on there. And let me pull my Heads-Up Display out of the way. And just watch what happens as I click and drag on this icon.
So I'm just clicking, and I'm going to drag right the way over. And you can see, very quickly what's happening here is I'm creating a fade in. Now before I release the mouse button, I mean I've made a 35 second fade in here, which is a little bit longer than I really need, but before I let go, notice as I drag up, I'm reshaping that fade. You see, I've got the linear value there? And as I drag up towards the top this is making, I suppose, a negative logarithmic fade. As I drag down, you're getting a classic logarithmic fade. So I'm creating this curve to adjust the way the fade is going to be applied. And of course a 0 is just a linear, straight fade.
If I drag over to nearer the beginning here, and maybe let's make this a little bit curved, a little bit logarithmic. That'll do about -25. And then I'm releasing the mouse button. And what's beautiful about doing this in Audition is that you get that update in the Waveform Display right away. You can see exactly what's going on.
So I'm just going to click back to the start. And I'll press play and you can hear the difference. Lovely, and there are a couple of other ways of doing this. If we go up to our Effects menu and go to our Amplitude and Compression section, well, we've got a couple of options. We've got a Fade Envelope (process)...and a Gain Envelope (process)...Now, if I choose Fade Envelope (process)..., for example, and of course it's giving me the fade right the way through the audio. It's made the adjustment for me. And this is based on a Smooth Fade In. And what's happened here is because I didn't make a selection, the effect has presumed I want to make the adjustment for the entire clip.
Now, what I'm going to do is I'm going to click Close without applying this. I'm going to select the end of this music. Let's zoom right out. I'm going to double click on the navigator and just select the end of this audio. Let's go back to Effects, Amplitude and Compression Fade Envelope (process)...And I'm just going to choose a Smooth Fade Out. And I hope you can see here, maybe if I can zoom in a little bit more, you can see what's happening is this yellow line has been drawn to show what fade effect is going to be applied. And in fact, if I click on this yellow line, I can drag it in situ, and I can reshape it any way I want. And I can create any kind of stepped fade, if I like.
See, I've got this option to make it Spline curves or linear lines between these control points. I can play to have a listen. It's going to be pretty long, so I won't bother. I can loop play, and I can turn the effect off and on. So I have presets up here, and then I can modify them myself. And then if I click Apply, there you can see it's applied that fade out towards the end of the audio.
Let me zoom back out a little bit. If I go back into my Effects, go back into Amplitude and Compression and this time choose Gain Envelope (process)...,you can see now, rather than having the audio begin at the bottom and end at the top, or vice versa, I've just got this yellow line flowing right the way through the audio. And in exactly the same way, I can now go in and begin to make adjustments.
Now, what I did just a second ago there is make a selection. And you can see when I made the selection, Audition compressed my adjustments into that selection region. You need to be a little bit careful about that when working with these effects. But it's pretty visual. You'll see it when it happens.
So let me add some pretty extreme adjustments here. Let's make this very loud, and very, very, very quiet. Let's add another one there. I'll click Apply. It takes a moment to be calculated. And then you can see this very, very obvious adjustment. I'll just deselect by clicking, and you can see I've made these very strong adjustments to the gain in this audio.
So, you can add fades very easily at any time by clicking on these handles at the top right and left of the audio Waveform Display, or you can use dedicated effects for the purpose.