Music Sources
One of my friends
Marty Gallagher
does theatrical music and sound. Originally he created a final master
on cassette tape for use during performances. Now he creates the final
master on Audio CD using our setup. Audio CD's have higher fidelity,
are more durable, provide random access, and are easy to queue during
the performance. If the theatre has CD-Audio capability, they much
prefer CD's over cassette tapes.
Marty has a portable DAT deck, which he uses to record the final tracks.
We transfer them into my machine using a
Digital Audio Labs Digital Only card
.
(When using a DAT to acquire files for an audio CD remember to sample
the material at 44Khz rather than the default 48Khz.)
For Red Book Audio, you can use any transfer or editing method that results
in WAV files, but the WAV files must be sampled at 44.1Khz, 16 bit, stereo.
Software
We recommend the
Corel CD-Creator Software, Version 2
now sold by
Adaptec
.
We are also using
Sound Forge 4.0
by
Sonic Foundry
to edit and prepare WAV files before recording. Although it was expensive,
it is powerful, fast, and easy to use. We have the Sound Forge noise
reduction plug-in as well and like it very much!
Media
We experimented with several different kinds of blank CD Media. We needed to
determine which type of CD would be compatible with both the CDR-1000 writer,
and with various Audio CD players.
We found that the
Mitsui Gold 74
works great for us. The other kinds we tried didn't work as well.
Remember that your conditions may be different. When you
first setup your CD Writer, you should try several brands and types of media.
Try them with both the writer and with several different readers.
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Hardware
Our multimedia system includes a
Yamaha CDR-1000,
and an
Iomega Jaz Drive
connected via an
Adaptec 2940 SCSI
interface to an
Intel Pentium 200MHz MMX
system with 64Mbytes of RAM.
Originally this system was configured with some fast SCSI AVI rated hard
drives (2
Seagate Barracudas
).
These drives were 4Gbytes each, and were connect to the processor via a
special
Adaptec 2940WD SCSI
differential interface. With the Barracuda drives we could record at 4X speed
with no problems!
Those drives have moved onto a video mastering system, and a
Maxtor 8Gbyte ultra IDE
drive has replaced them. We were pleased to discover that this drive is
also fast enough to support 4X recording speed.
Notes
When we began, we knew that "Red Book" audio must be recorded in a single session.
We thought that meant that the entire contents of the CD had to be recorded in
a single stream of data.
After watching the software do it's thing while recording "Red Book" audio CD's,
we realize that "single session" means that the "directory" of the CD must
be written once and once only.
Tracks can be written one at a time with time out in-between. After all of the
desired tracks are written, the software writes the "directory".
Then you are finished. You can't ever add any more audio tracks to this disk,
because you cannot update the directory after it has been written.
Your hardware does need to keep up the steady data stream during the writing of
each track, but there is no requirement to stream 650Mbytes of data all in one
burst.
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Bill Den Beste's CD Mastering Page