Important Things to Know A Variety of Transition Options There are more transition options than SegueIn and SegueOut. Universal Overlap, SegueIn, SegueOut, TrimStart, TrimEnd, Cue, OnRamp, and OffRamp are all transition options available to you! Learn the role each of them can play and how they interact, on the Transitions page.

Customizing Segue Transitions Between Songs

While Command Center's "universal overlap" feature, found in System Preferences, will assure a nice, neat, consistent amount of overlap from one track to the next, Command Center users can get lots fancier about their segues from one song to the next, thanks to the addition of "segue point" support. All that's required is that you initially mark your songs according to the amount of time at the front and back of the song that you consider safe to overlap with other songs that also have segue times marked. If Command Center encounters two, back-to-back songs that have segue points marked, it will overlap the two by whichever value is less.

Marking Your "Seg Points"

1.   Open a folder containing some songs, and assure the Seguein and Segueout attribute columns are visible. If they are not, click the Attributes pulldown menu and put a checkmark next to each of those attributes. The columns will be displayed at the far right end of the folder and may need to be expanded to be fully visible, by grabbing the "crack" between them and dragging to make the columns wider.
   
   
   
2.   Listen to a song in one of the media players provided with your system, such as SoundPlay, MediaPlayer, or CL-Amp. Note the intro and fade-out times you consider safe for overlapping, and enter that information into the corresponding Seguein and Segueout attributes for that song. The time should be expressed in x.x seconds. "13" means 13 seconds. "63" means one minute and three seconds. "48.8" means 48 and 8/10 seconds. Accuracy is measured down the to the millisecond, though the most accuracy you'll realistically need to express is down to a tenth of a second.

Some Things to Consider When Marking Segues

Time is the best teacher for setting segue points. You'll learn through personal experience what you like and dislike, and how aggressive you should be according to your station's needs. However, here are a couple good rules-of-thumb.

•   When setting Seguein points, you're often safe making them the same value as your Onramp attribute, since the Onramp represents the amount of a song that a voice-track can safely talk over. As a starting point, you can cheat by copying all your Onramp times to your Seguein points. Since Segueout points are normally fairly short, the danger of too much overlap with a long intro ramp is minimal. Expect to do some adjusting after-the-fact though, because some ramp intros are too aggressive to be artistically overlapped very much with the previous song. You'll know better about the impact after you have heard how well or poorly some song intros "play with others."
  
  
  
•   This segue system is reliant on the volumes in the actual songs rather than settable "fade-down" envelopes, so it's best if you set overlaps that occur after the song is already starting to naturally fade out. Songs with fade-out endings seem to do well with Segueout points set somewhere between four and six seconds. Sometimes you can go a bit deeper, however try to avoid the temptation to set really long fade-out segue points, even if the fade-out is unusually long. It seldom works well to have one song overlap with another song for an extended period of time.
  
  
  
•   The amount of overlap specified in your universal overlap preferences is not applied to the overlap between two cuts that have segue points, however for most stations it is still advisable to keep universal overlap enabled, to assure that cuts that do not have segue points marked still transition well.
  
  

Once you have your segues properly marked, and tweaked to your liking, you will hear a dramatic improvement in your on-air presentation, compared to broadcasting using only universal overlap.


Table of Contents