Smooth crossfading in Winamp

By George

I recently came to conclusion that I’m an audiophile. Collecting tons of music, rating, listening, and trying to get the maximum of my cheap equipment makes me an audiophile (I think). I give a respect to my AKG K272 HD headphones and the SoundBlaster X-Fi Xtreme Audio soundcard. I also have Technics SL-PG580A CD player and Technics SA-EX100 receiver, which are 10 years old but still give good sound, enough for the money and the years passed. Everything is okay but the Jamo Studio 180 speakers. They have a range of 50 – 20.000 kHZ which makes them low-quality speakers that give harsh, sharp treble and lack bass.

But, this post wasn’t about my audio equipment. I would like to explain about crossfading in Winamp. As I was listening to music everyday, I hated the ’silence’ (it breaks the pleasure) between one and another track so I started to play with the Winamp Crossfader. After few days trying, I made a setting that is enough good for the ears: cutting off the silence at the beginning and the end of a track, crossfading in 3 secs, logarithmic fades, volume controls etc. That makes smooth and gently crossfades between the tracks. It can be used at home for your pleasure, cafe bars, etc…

To activate the plug-in (Winamp v5), go to Preferences -> Plug-ins/Output -> Nullsoft DirectSound Output -> Configure.

Here are the specifications I used:
Buffer Length: 20000 ms
Prebuffer: 1000 ms
Buffer-ahead: 20000 ms
Default fade length: 5000 ms (enabled on end of a song and on pause/stop)
On seek: 500 ms
Silence remover: -25 dB
Enable volume control, smooth volume changes
Volume control: Logarithmic, Map 0% to -30 dB and logarithmic fades.

Enjoy the smooth crossfading.

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