CD Mastering Software
Your Final Step

Signal Processing finished? Check!

Audio Files edited and trimmed? Check!

CD Mastering Software to the rescue.

You're ready to create your CD master.

In order to this there are still have a few decisions to make.

The first involves how to set up your CD track markers. Will each track have its own start and end marker? Or will there just be a combined start/end marker between tracks? Or a combination of both types?

If it's a live recording that has some spoken intros to the songs, how will these be I.D.'ed? Will these intros have their own track? Or will they be part of the song (this would mean when your listener cues up the track the first thing she'll hear is the intro). Or will these mini-monologues appear between the tracks?? This means your listener never hears the intros when she cues up any track – they're only heard when the CD is played straight through (or by listening to consecutive tracks).

Whew!!!

Who knew there could be that many decisions?!

Wait – there's a few more 'tricks' you should think about.

How about hidden tracks? This is similar to the technique of putting dialogue 'between' the tracks in our live recording. But this time entire songs are put there. And again, they'll only be heard when your CD is listened to on a track-by-track basis.

You can 'hide' a bonus track at the end of the CD this way. The technique involves placing the bonus song between the last CD track and another final four-second 'blank' track. Why four seconds? Because that is the minimum track length stipulated for the compact disk format.

I should make it clear that these tracks aren't really hidden, but rather made inaccessible - unless your listener wants to fast forward or rewind through the surrounding tracks.

The real way to hide a track is to put it in the pause area before the start of the CD. Another standard of the compact disk format is that they all have a 2 second pause (or silence) before the beginning of the entire CD. This is where you can also put 'hidden' audio. It's accessed by the playing the first track, hitting pause, and rewinding until the “beginning” of the hidden song. This is a nice trick especially if you keep it a secret from your listener!! But! - be warned: a lot of players (including recent models) don't let your users do this.

The only CD mastering software I know of that does this task is WaveLab. There are others for sure, but since this program has been flawlessly at the core of my business, I haven't really had the need to research for other programs.

So we've made all these decisions! Are we done yet? Can we make a CD now?

Just a few more details. Some critically important.

Would you like to have song, artist, and album title displayed on your listeners CD players (if the player supports is, that is)? Then you'll have to enter that as text with your CD mastering software.

By the way, this is not the same thing as entering your info in a database like Freedb or CDDB. That requires an internet connection. CD TEXT has the information actually embedded on the CD so that TEXT-capable players will display it to your listener.

Is your CD mastering software capable of creating red book CD's? Can you enter isrc codes if you want your music tracked? Have you applied dithering to your files??

That last point is crucial.

Once all this is taken care of, you've done everything you need for having a truly polished, professional master.

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