Making a seamless mix

Hi all,

I want to mess around with making some 'mixed' mixtapes of music (mainly ambient, minimal beats and stuff). I want to do some easy cross-fading/beatmatching to some nice long mixes to work to/run to.

I don't really want to do it on the fly with DJ software, but a nice basic easy sequencer would be fine. I've not used any audio software for a long time, so any advice would be great.

Also - free is possible!

Is there anything out there for this kind of thing? Would Audacity cover it?

you technically could do it with audacity but it'd be a pain because of beatmatching. ableton would probably be your best bet if you dont wanna use something like virtual dj

yeah pretty much any DAW if you want to pre-mix it all. most of them have ways to warp/timestretch audio files for beatmatching....ableton seems to be the most popular for this though

sweet I'll look into getting my hands on ableton. thx!

If you want something relatively simple for just laying down pre-existing tracks, then - http://www.reaper.fm/

It's what I use for all my mix sets and doing the final mix/mastering of a seamless album

(free - with a nag screen, but only 60 dollar for the full thing)

Another cheap option would be trying to get Ableton Live Lite, which comes free with a bunch of hardware controllers and stuff. I got it when I bought the Korg Gadget app on the iPad. There's a limitation on the number of audio tracks you can create, but for a simple mix you could just use 2 tracks.

cool edit pro could help depending on how much beat-matching you're attempting

I remember a bunch of years ago there was a program called "MixMeister" which was ridiculously easy to use.

EDIT: Turns out it's still around...

http://www.mixmeister.com/

lol i hated that program

Yeah, it's kinda shit, but it'll probably be a good way for him to get into making mixes.