RE: CD Mastering Conundrum

[CarlJacobson@cakewalk.com]

Sounds to me like you did not split the tracks at the zero crossing point. 
 

1. Find the point that you want the split to occur.
2. Zoom in to the sample level in your wave editor. 
3. Split at the zero crossing point.

4. If it's impossible to split your stereo file at zero crossing on both 
the
left and right channel. Draw fade-outs at the end of one track and fade-ins
at the beginning of the next track so that they split at zero. If you make
these fades only a few samples long, you'll avoid clicks, but the fades
should be short enough to be indiscernible by the listener.

Hope that helps,

Carl

-----Original Message-----
From: SoundFNR@aol.com [mailto:SoundFNR@aol.com]
Sent: Thursday, November 08, 2001 4:23 AM
To: Loopers-Delight@loopers-delight.com
Subject: CD Mastering Conundrum


Anyone out there know the answer to this?

When mastering a Loop CD with a 60min evolving loop performance I had
trouble 
splitting the long piece into 6 tracks ( he wanted this to help him listen
to 
the various sections.
I split the track up into 6 .wav files (Cool Edit Pro) and then 
reassembled 
onto CD (Nero), with 0s pause beween tracks.
This produced clicks on the changes from one track to another.

I  know why this happens, because the CD format works with blocks of
samples, 
so if your .wav is not an exact number of blocks in length it will be 
truncated.
This means that the rejoined sections are then discontinuous, so there's a 
click.

I notice that on commercial CDs that segue (most of Zappa's for instace) 
the

transition is OK, but if you play just one track there's often a click at
the 
beginning or end. I assume this is because the tracks were edited ro 
exactly

the right length for the CD format, and this meant that the change from
track 
to track would only fall onto a zero crossing point by chance.

So:-
Does anyone have the info
1)How to get round this?
2) How to calculate the length for a .wav file so that there's no
truncation?
3) What is the Block size? 
4) There also seems to be an issue with the CD format trimming a very 
small 
section from the beginning of a .wav, anyone know what's going on here.

Well the guy I did the mastering for couldn't hear the clicks, but I 
reckon 
this is an issue for the making of loop CDs generally, as it seems very 
natural to want to split a long piece into manageable tracks (at least 
some 
of the time).

thanks

andy butler