Fade Audio In GarageBand For Mac

A seemingly simple thing to do is GarageBand is have your track or song fade in or out. But finding the method for doing this can be difficult. A fade is an automation. To fade, you need to show automations and then edit the automation line to change the volume over time. You can do this on a single track, or on the master track to fade the entire song.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today I'm going to show you how to fade audio in and out in GarageBand.
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So this is one of the biggest frustrations new users have with GarageBand. You have some audio and you want to do what seems like the simplest thing. You just want to either fade it in or fade it out or both. It doesn't seem like there's a fade in or fade out command or there's an easy way to do it or anything like that. But once you learn where this functionality is, it's pretty easy to do. 
Alright, so note that I'm using GarageBand version 10.3.2. Here I've just laid in a sample loop and I have it playing for a little while. I want to have it fade in and fade out. So you can look through here and you won't find too much. If you search you'll find there's is a Create volume fadeout on main output and you can use that just to get the fadeout. But it may not be the effect that you want and it's not going to help you with fade in. 
So the key here is to realize that fading is an automation. An automation is when something gradually changes over time. So to view Automations you need to go to Mix, Show Automation. Now we've got something to work with. Over here we see a pull down menu and the default one is Volume. There's actually a bunch of different stuff you can automate. For fading Volume is exactly what we want. 
Then here we've got this line in the middle of our track. This is the volume line. So if we were to drag it up that  would increase the volume. Drag it down would decrease the volume. I'll Undo to get it back in the middle.
So what we want to do is have it start with the volume completely off and then gradually build up. Let's find a point where that would be. Maybe right here and what I'm going to do is click. If I click on that line it's going to create a point there. So now I have two points. The starting point here and this second point. I can drag the starting point down and now you can see it ramps up the volume. I can test it out. (music). For fading out I can do the same thing. I'll click here on the line to create a point and I'll click here at the very end to create a point. I'll drag this last point all the way down. Now it will fade out.
Great! But what about multiple tracks. Chances are you're going to have multiple tracks if you're working on music in GarageBand. How can you fade in and out the entire song? So to get rid of the automation on this I can do that several ways. Of course I can Undo a few times. I can also select each point and delete the points. Once I do that it will return to a regular line and then I can position it where I want. I can also just click the enable automation button to turn it off and that way it ignores the automation here and I can set one for the entire song.
So now I've added a second loop to this and I have two tracks. The idea is I want to fade them both in and out at the same time. I'm going to go to Track and then Show Master Track. It is the Master Track that will control volume for all tracks. This one has Automation as well. So it obeys the Show or Hide Automation there and you can select Volume here for Automation. Then you have this line here that you can control. I can click here to create a point and drag the initial point down. I can create a point at the end. I can create another point here and I can drag this down. Now the volume for all tracks will follow this automation path. (music). 
Now you may want more of a curve here than a straight line. The way to do that is to add multiple points. So I'm going to add another point in the middle there and another point here. Then you can drag each one of these up and down. You can also drag left and right but you only can do in one dimension. So when you click and drag you must immediately decide am I dragging left and right or up and down. As soon as you drag in one dimension you're not going to be able to drag in the other. You create a little bit of a curve there.
Another thing you can do is you can actually draw using the Command key. You can press the Command key and move around and draw and create a curve like that. So you can do all sorts of fancy things.

Fade Audio In GarageBand For Mac

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