Compiling your songs on a CD

[malamut]

Hi folks,

after having successfully created quite a few songs with Tracktion it's now time for me to create actual audio CD compilations from them.

Professionals know what to do in such a case: give the songs to a mastering engineer, and don't try this at home please. Granted. But I'm not a professional. I'm just a hobby musician who wants to distribute his works to family and friends. As I see it, I just need an audio CD burning software with a few reasonable features. Besides, such a software would be useful for the mastering engineer, too, right?

Reasonable features such as: Reading wav, flac, and ogg files. Setting a volume level individually for each track. Fine-tuning pauses or crossfades between tracks. Fine-tuning start and end of CD track areas. And normalizing the complete thing (not the single tracks, of course!) before actually burning it.

As you can see, I'm really modest. I do not demand things like volume-envelopes, equalizers or VST-plugins, although that would be nice-to-have of course. But after googling for a couple of hours and searching various forums, it seems to me that there is no software below $300 which is doing at least parts of what I need.

Am I right? Or is there anything out there which I missed? What are you Tracktioneers using? I mean, almost all of you are creating CDs in the end, right? Have you all bought Samplitude or CD Architect?

My dream would be having something like a Tracktion version which can burn CDs. I think the user interface could be tweaked to do that in a very straight-forward way... perhaps an idea for Tracktion v3.

[valley]

frankly I just burn in nero.


For trying to get a uniform and cohesive feel across the entire CD I would[1] load all of the tracks into tracktion, and do a finalisation process there, just to make sure that levels, eq chracter, and dynamics are not too jarring from tune to tune.

Then just export the songs as individual wavs, load them into any CD burner and burn your CD.


[1] the days of being able to produce an entire 60 minutes worth of music before the early tracks have become so dated that even my dad thinks they sound old is long behind me.

[SuitcaseOfLizards]

Terrifyingly enough, I do pretty much what Valley does!

I render out individual songs as wave files, then create a new project called "mastering", into which I import the waves I'm going to burn to CD. I then tweak volumes, throw on a pile of Voxengo plugs, etc. and.. like Valley does.. export 'em. I have a temp dir where I put the waves and I just number 'em by track.

I got Nero with my DVD burner, so I use that to burn an audio CD of the waves I exported. Works a treat.

There's probably a "better" way but it's going to be more expensive, and why bother? I'm not sending the thing out for replication (yet.. heh heh heh).

[AD80]

Terrifyingly enough, I do pretty much what Valley does!

I can top that, I use Windows Media Player to burn my compilations ! Its easier and faster for me to make a playlist and then choose copy to disk and pick the songs I want. My levels are usually similar becuase I double check all the statistics in Audition and adjust as necessary. But even without double checking them the difference is negligeable to most people. So I just burn with Media player.

[SuitcaseOfLizards]

Damn.. never thought of using Media Player! It'd make it easy to construct an album "on the fly" via a playlist, provided (like you do) you make sure your levels are good. Probably makes it easy to audition the album before you commit it to disk.

I might try that, I'm always up for cheap and easy solutions!

[AD80]

Damn.. never thought of using Media Player! It'd make it easy to construct an album "on the fly" via a playlist, provided (like you do) you make sure your levels are good. Probably makes it easy to audition the album before you commit it to disk.

Thats exactly why I use it . I have all my tracks in a huge playlist so I can pick and choose which I want on a CD. And its easy to make sub-playlists right from the big playlist and burn those.

Another reason I use it is becuase I kept forgeting to choose "Music disk" instead of "Data Disk" in Easy CD creator . So I would get in the car, pop in my cd, and hear silence.

[Rack Bitz]

you guys really should try audacity its free
and it works great for little mastering type bullshit
cheers

[Steve Prince]

you guys really should try audacity its free
and it works great for little mastering type bullshit
cheers

Yeah, Audacity rocks and who can argue about the price!

Steve

[AD80]

I read a lot of good things about it. I'll give it a try definitely.

Does anybody know if sourceforge stuff can be incorportated into commercial DAW's? Maybe Jules can incorporate it into T2 .

[malamut]

Ok, thank you all for your answers. It is interesting to see that no-one has a solution which would deserve being called optimal. So I'm not alone.

A question to those using Nero: are you using the OEM Nero which came with your CD burner, or are you using the retail version? I'm asking because the retail version contains a tool called SoundTrax which looks as if it were close to what I want. But there is no downloadable demo of Nero at the moment, so I cannot really find out.

I cannot understand the recommendation of Audacity in this context, by the way. I have Audacity myself. It is a nice free audio editor. But unless I'm greatly mistaken, it has no CD writing support. So I can't see why any Tracktion user would want to use Audacity instead of T itself for finalization (as suggested by valley).

Actually, if T just allowed to set track start/stop markers for generating a TOC file, it could be used easily with any of the freeware cd writers flying around. Since it's so simple, perhaps it would really make sense to incorporate that into Tracktion.

Oh, one thing about sourceforge and commercial software: there is no general rule on that; it depends on the license policy of the individual sourceforge software. Audacity has GPL which is a non-exclusive license, so it would be possible to incorporate that into commercial software if all contributors to Audacity agreed to it. Of course, this gets more difficult the more contributors there are...

[Def Dave]

Ok, thank you all for your answers. It is interesting to see that no-one has a solution which would deserve being called optimal. So I'm not alone.

Perhaps this will fit your needs:
http://www.cdburnerxp.se/

Dave

[malamut]

Perhaps this will fit your needs:
http://www.cdburnerxp.se/

Thank you for the idea, but I've already tested that one (and approximately 20 other free- and shareware burners). It's not better for mastering purposes than the others. No level adjustment of single tracks, for example.

Many burners offer normalization of each single track, but none seems to offer user adjustment of the levels of the single tracks with normalisation of the complete oeuvre in the end. Only very few offer even the free setting of cd track markers.

So, valley's 'solution' is still the best...