Burn, baby burn, ambient inferno!

April 4, 2006 9:42 AM

Help me burn a properly "mixed" cd with transitions, separate tracks, etc on a Windows XP machine.

I've been trying to burn an ambient compilation I created in Nero 7 Soundtrax for the past day or so and it just ain't happening. It hangs at the 90% mark when "processing audio files" and the machine freezes completely, forcing me to do a complete restart. While I can probably "borrow" a work copy of 6.0, I'd prefer not to and instead want to ask you, the green: what do you use?

Specifics:
1) I want to give the listener separate tracks, so just burning the files as one long MP3 created in Audacity using iTunes isn't an option.

2) I don't mind paying for good software that does the trick well, but under $50 would work nicely. Freeware would be, of course, best.

posted by beaucoupkevin to Computers & Internet (10 answers total)

Both Realplayer and the slightly less odious JetAudio have separate track CD-burning burning capabilities for free. You can also adjust the amount of time between tracks (no gap, one second gap, two, and so on.) No crossfade, though, unless you want to upgrade the Realplayah (which, unforunately, requires handing them money.)

Other than that..... yeah, I got nothin'.
posted by WidgetAlley at 9:49 AM on April 4, 2006

Ableton Live:

http://www.ableton.com for the Demo (the usual sites will have the cracked version)
posted by empath at 10:10 AM on April 4, 2006

Btw, when I record mix CDs live (recording from directly from vinyl), I use Soundforge and mark regions for each track. Then you can save the regions as seperate wave files, and burn with Nero, and it'll be a seamless mix with tracks.

There's no reason you couldn't use audacity to do the same thing. You just cut and paste each part of the complete CD as a seperate wav file, and burn it with Nero (making sure you get rid of the 2 second delay between files)
posted by empath at 10:13 AM on April 4, 2006

I have made smoothly mixed CDs in audacity -- it isn't always the stablest, but for its price (free) it's quite impressive. Also, it runs on lesser hardware -- it will run on my g3 ibook whereas none of the fancy programs (some of which I might have even paid for) would run well or at all on it. It sounds like you've already done the mixing part, so separating out the tracks into separate wav files is what would be left. Audacity can do this -- label the edges and then export to multiple files using those labels.

Removing the gap between tracks is probably the trickiest part left (at least, this is what I found). There are various ways of doing this (and fancy software will do it easier; probably if your program worked it would automatically do it), and afaik audacity can't do it automatically. I have done this by making wav files (in audacity) that are sized in CD frames (I think they are 1/75th of a second, though I'm not sure). If you are getting small gaps even when you specify no gaps, this is probably because the length of your audio files are not in round numbers of CD frames (i.e. they are not divisible by 1/75th of a second) and so it adds an extra frame filled with silence. Normally, you would never notice this, but with a smoothly mixed CD it will sound bad. Then you can burn the wav files in just about anything to make a gapless CD (I used iTunes).
posted by advil at 10:14 AM on April 4, 2006

I use Cool Edit Pro (also known as Abobe Audition) to build a song list. using the multitrack mode you can overlap each song specifically to how you want it. When you're happy with the sound and transitions, mix it down to one long wav file. From there, select the first song, making sure to make your selection at the zero cross marks and save the selection as 01.wav. Delete it from your long file and begin again, with the 2nd song. Continue until you have your whole CD cut into tracks in a directory. Then, using your favorite burning software, create an audio CD with your all your wav files. Make sure to create it with 0 second pauses between songs. If you would like a more detailed description, you can e-mail me. Check my profile for my address.
posted by Hanover Phist at 10:26 AM on April 4, 2006

The one time I did this (and it came out great), I followed Hanover Phist's steps above, but instead of splitting the tracks in the audio editor, I used a freeware program called CD Wave. The advantage of CD Wave is that it makes sure that the splits all occur at the "2352 byte/588 sample borders". According to the author's FAQ, this is important because:

A CD audio disc is divided into sectors. Each sector holds 1/75 seconds of audio, or 588 samples at 44100 samples per second, or 2352 bytes. If the size of a WAV recording is not a multiple of 588 samples, the recording software will fill the remainder of the sector with zeroes. If you have a continuous recording (live), you’ll hear a short click in between two songs, as a result of the padding zeroes. To prevent this, the program always cuts on 588 sample borders, so two adjacent songs will have no clicks in between.
posted by llamateur at 11:09 AM on April 4, 2006

Here are some instructions for mastering gapless audio CDs in Audacity. Note that in newer versions of Audacity you can use the "Export Multiple" command to save all the tracks at once, instead of exporting one at a time.
posted by mbrubeck at 11:11 AM on April 4, 2006

Thanks for that link, mbrubeck. It's nice to know that Audacity has that built-in.
posted by llamateur at 11:23 AM on April 4, 2006

that audacity tutorial is the one I was originally working from (I just couldn't find it), so it probably should supersede my half-remembered reconstruction of it above.
posted by advil at 11:31 AM on April 4, 2006

By the way, I'm certain that I did not need to break tracks on sector boundaries (only frame boundaries), though I have seen that advice in various places online.
posted by advil at 11:32 AM on April 4, 2006