Audacity fade out: the three ways and when each one is right

Select the region you want to fade across, then Effect, Fading, Fade Out. The volume falls to silence over the length of your selection.

There is no dialogue and no settings. The selection length is the fade length, which means the only control you have is where you drag.

Fade In is the same in reverse. For the end of an episode, three to five seconds is a normal fade. For ducking under a voiceover, a second or less.

Fade Out is linear: it reduces the level by an equal amount each moment. The trouble is that human hearing is not linear, so a mathematically even fade sounds as though it drops away quickly and then lingers near the end.

Studio Fade Out, in the same Fading menu, uses a curve shaped to how we actually perceive loudness. It sounds smooth and even, which is what people expect from a fade on a record or in a film.

For music endings and episode outros, use Studio Fade Out by default. Save the linear version for very short fades where the shape is inaudible anyway, such as smoothing a click at an edit point.

For anything more complicated than a single fade, use the Envelope tool from the toolbar. It draws a volume curve along the track, and you shape it by clicking to add control points and dragging them.

This is how you duck music under speech: add a point before the voice starts, one just after, and pull the second down. The music drops as the voice comes in and rises again when it stops.

The envelope is non-destructive. It is a setting on the track rather than a change to the audio, so you can adjust it endlessly and it only becomes permanent when you render or export.

To remove a control point, drag it off the top or bottom of the track. Switch back to the Selection tool when you are finished, or you will keep adding points by accident.

A crossfade is one thing fading out while another fades in. Audacity has Crossfade Clips and Crossfade Tracks under Effect and Fading.

Crossfade Tracks needs the two pieces on separate tracks, overlapping by the amount you want the crossfade to last. Select across the overlap on both tracks and apply.

Crossfade Clips works on two adjacent clips on the same track, which is the simpler case and the one you want when joining two takes of the same sentence.

A short crossfade of a few hundredths of a second is also the reliable cure for an edit that clicks no matter what else you try.

Too long is the usual one. A ten-second fade at the end of a podcast episode feels like the show cannot decide whether it has finished. Three to five seconds is plenty.

Fading speech is the other. A sentence that fades away sounds like a technical fault rather than an ending. Cut speech cleanly and fade only music and ambience.

And fading out a track that already ends naturally fights the recording. If the music resolves on its own, let it.

For a podcast where every episode wants the same intro, outro and fade treatment, doing it by hand each week is where consistency slips. Hilite applies the same treatment on export automatically, and we make it, so weigh that as you like.