Help Me Indulge My DJ Dreams

January 8, 2015 1:02 PM

I want to take two songs and mix them together so that it goes something like Song A, Song B, Song A. I'm using Audacity (but am open to suggestions of other programs), and I have a mac. I'm not sure of the correct lingo for what I'm trying to do. Any help would be hugely appreciated.
posted by kmr to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

Audacity is bad for this. You want to use either Ableton Live or Traktor. Traktor is probably easiest to learn, you just load up the two tracks, hit sync, and you can fade back and forth between them. You have to line up the beats yourself, but that's not too difficult to sort out.
posted by empath at 1:07 PM on January 8, 2015 [2 favorites]

VirtualDJ as well.
posted by humboldt32 at 2:55 PM on January 8, 2015

If the tempos are reasonably close, just use Traktor's sync to match them up. You can also set cue points in Traktor, to jump to the parts of the song you are interested in.
posted by bashos_frog at 3:10 PM on January 8, 2015

Audacity is absolutely not what you want. It is a program for editing audio in a more granular (not granular in the synthesis sense, audio nerds) way.

Ableton, Trakto, FL Studio (with Deckadance)... these will do what you want.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 7:09 PM on January 8, 2015

Best answer: DJay 2 will do this. You can load up all of your music, change the cross fade settings, beat match and then have the app record the output as a separate file.
posted by terrapin at 6:46 AM on January 9, 2015

I once did manage to make a mashup in Audacity. It was a one-off thing I did on a lark while in grad school, so I didn't want to pay for software for it.

Here's what I did: I counted beats manually to get the BPMs and used the Change Speed filter to make them match. I also had to guess the keys and match them with Change Pitch, while also compensating for the pitch shift caused by the speed change. After this preprocessing, I chopped up the tracks and moved the pieces around, syncing the beats manually and adding crossfades at all the transitions...

What I'm saying is, it's certainly possible, but it's a fair bit of work. The programs other people have suggested will probably make it much easier.
posted by narain at 12:40 PM on January 9, 2015

Response by poster: For what its worth: tried Traktor and could not figure out how to work it. I have no DJ skills or lingo, obviously, and think that was too complicated. I then tried DJay 2 which was simple enough for me! Thanks for all suggestions!
posted by kmr at 7:29 AM on January 23, 2015