Creating a CD Mastering Playlists

Using the Peak Pro 6 Playlist for CD Mastering. Items covered in this tutorial: Gathering your assets...!

1

Creating and saving the Playlist...!

2

Gaps, Pauses and more...!

3

Using the Vbox and Plug-ins in the Playlist...!

4

CD Text...!

5

Delivering your Master...!

5

! Introduction... The point of the tutorial is to get you comfortable in building a Playlist in Peak Pro 6 for the purpose of Mastering a CD. Peak Pro 6 can do many things beyond CD Mastering, this is what makes Peak such a useful tool to have, but for the purpose of this tutorial I will be focussing only on how to use the Peak Pro 6 Playlist to Master a CD. If you are new to Peak, you may want to familiarize yourself with the Peak Pro 6 Playlist before starting this tutorial. The Peak Pro 6 User Guide, specifically Chapter 6 on the Playlist, would be a good thing to have accessible while going through this tutorial since I will be referring to parts of Peak Pro 6 and using terms that would have been explained in the User Guide that you may not be familiar with. Also, this tutorial will not be able to teach to how to Master a CD, only how to use Peak Pro 6 and the Playlist as a CD Mastering tool.

Gathering your assets... Peak Pro 6 is a powerful CD Mastering tool used by many professionals. There are a few steps you can follow when creating your Playlist that will make it easier and more secure if you ever need to move the Playlist or change computer/studios. When starting a Mastering project in Peak Pro 6, the first thing I do is collect my assets for the project in one central location on my computer. While doing this, I also make sure that all of those assets are the same sample rate, bit depth, number of channels (stereo) and file type. If I find that I am starting with a large variety of files, many times the Batch File processor in Peak Pro 6 is a handy tool to automatically convert everything to the correct specifications and locate them in one folder.

Page 1

Using the Peak Pro 6 Playlist for CD Mastering. The reason to keep all of the audio assets in the same location is twofold. First, this will make it much easier if you need to either change computers or come back to a project at a later date. By having all of the audio in the same location, this ensures that everything will be there for you. The second reason to keep everything for that project isolated is to stop you from possible deleting, moving or altering necessary files. This happens more often that you would think, I know this from my time spent in BIAS Technical support.

Creating and saving the Playlist... I will use as an example, an album I recently finished for the band Frobeck, the album is "Other Side of the Light". The mixing and some post processing was done in Pro Tools HD, we sent the mix downs through analog outboard gear and recaptured in Pro Tools, ending up with 96 KHz 24 Bit Dual mono Broadcast Wave files. To start I created a New Folder on my media drive called "OSL Mastering", then I created another folder called Audio Assets. Using the Batch FIle Processor, I had Peak Pro 6 automatically convert all of the Dual mono files to Stereo Interleaved and made sure they were all in the Audio Assets folder. Once finished I disabled the Batch File Processor in Peak Pro 6. At this point I open all of the files I intended to use in the Playlist/Album, then I created a new Playlist document and made the Playlist type an Overlap/Gap or Album Compilation. Before anything else I save the Playlist, name it and

Page 2

Using the Peak Pro 6 Playlist for CD Mastering. have it save to the OSL Mastering folder, the same directory where the Audio Assets folder is located. By keeping everything in the same "Project " folder, this can save you time and headaches later on. There are a few different ways to get your songs into the Playlist, the fastest way is just to drag from the folder where they are stored and drop them on the Playlist timeline - this will open them in Peak at the same, although once they are in the Playlist you will still need to get them in order. The other ways are, with the files already opened in Peak Pro 6, to use the "Add" button from he upper left corner of the Playlist window or to drag each song/file from Peakʼs Contents Window. I find that using the Add button in the Playlist window the best option since you are also setting the order of the songs as you import them into the Playlist.

Gaps, Pauses and more... Now that we have our songs in the Playlists and in the order we want them in, it is time to get the spacing set correctly. There are 2 ways that this can be done in Peak Pro 6, either by dragging the regions apart in the Playlist to create space or by entering a time in the Pause column for each track. When dragging the Pause Playlist events apart, the space or Gap in between is written to the end of the previous track as silence, essentially making the previous track longer. When entering a Pause time, you will see a space created between the tracks as the Pause marker is placed at the end of the previous track the CD Player will count down into the the next track. Both of these methods accomplish the same effect by different methods and when a CD is played from start to finish. If you are playing the CD in shuffle mode, a Pause might be better suited as it is attached to the track being played, not the previous track. The game changes completely if the songs are imported from a CD onto the computer since Pauses will be interpreted exactly the same as Gaps. Gap

12 Frame Negative Offset

When creating continuous play CDs, one thing to consider is Track Start Offsets. All CD players un-mute differently when skipping right to a track to play. Page 3

Using the Peak Pro 6 Playlist for CD Mastering. Some un-mute quickly, some take longer, and some seem to be different every time. This is why we usually use offsets (the track start actually is written several frames before your mark). If two songs are butted up against each other, on some players you may hear a brief burst of the previous song when going directly to a track. However, if you do not use offsets, some players will clip the beginning of the song when skipping directly to it. Most Mastering Engineers choose to err on the side of not clipping the beginning of a track, even if it means you hear a tiny burst of noise from the previous track sometimes. There is no right answer to this except to say that newer CD players seem to handle this better. In Peak Pro 6 a negative TS Offset will make it start earlier, and conversely a positive offset will start later. Hidden tracks - There has long been stories about a hidden track located before track 1 (Track 0). This is possible with some older authoring tools on the Mac and a couple on Windows but is not advisable since the CD will not meet the RedBook standard and in other words not play on most CD Players. Although Peak Pro 6 can not do this, Peak only makes RedBook compliant CDs, there is a way to "hide audio" between 2 songs on a CD. Audio in Pause "Audio in Pause" is audio than can only be heard when playing from one song into the next on a CD player and is exactly like it sounds, audio that is playing during the pause count down. In Peak the way you would do this would be to drag the Pause marker to the desired end of the previous track, then move the Start Marker to the desired beginning of the next track. This will leave a shaded spot in between, in theory with audio.

Using the Vbox and Plug-ins in the Playlist... The Vbox plug-in matrix is the only way of accessing plug-ins in Peak's Playlist and can be very powerful when used correctly. The best place to start is choose one song that is indicative of the sound you are going for to help you get your initial Vbox settings – this should be done outside of the Playlist, at first. Normally I will have my plug-in chain set up in the Vbox, with all of the settings for each plug-in ready to go, and also save it as a Vbox preset in case I need to quickly access those settings again. Now in the Peak Playlist, in the Vbox Insert column for Track 1, choose Make Snapshot – This will attach the Vbox in the state it is in to that track. Now do the Page 4

Using the Peak Pro 6 Playlist for CD Mastering. same thing for each Track in the Playlist until they all have these same settings. Once you have the same Vbox settings for each track, it will be much easier to jump between songs to make adjustments.

CD Text... CD Text is an extension of the RedBook CD standard that allows for storage of additional information such as album name, song name, and artist, on a RedBook compliant audio CD. The information is stored in the lead-in area of the CD, this is part of the reason for the 2 second gap in the beginning of the CD. Please keep in mind that CD-Text is not readable by iTunes, the easiest and most reliable way to verify that the CD-Text is correct on a CD with your Mac is by using the Terminal – the Terminal is command line interface for the Mac OS X Operating System. Type in "drutill cdtext", a complete list of the CD Text, ISRC codes and UPC/EAN codes will be listed from that CD is they are present. For more information about this issue, follow this link

Delivering your Master... Once you have all of your tracks in the right order, the fades sounding good and all of your plug-ins working just right it it is time to deliver the master. There are a few different methods available to do this in Peak depending on your needs, the most common being either a RedBook CD master or a DDP 2.0 file set. Burning a CD from a Playlist is done by first selecting all of the track in the Playlist, an easy way to do this is by using the shortcut cmd-A. Now click on the “Burn Playlist to Audio CD” button. When the Burn Audio CD window appears, you will see that you have some options available, these are all useful for different situations. I will go down the list to explain how these options can be used and when they should not be used.

Page 5

Using the Peak Pro 6 Playlist for CD Mastering. • Dither - If you are working with 24 bit or 32 bit source files, Dithering when reducing to 16 bit is a good idea. • Verify after burn - This is a bit for bit comparison of what was written to the CD compared to the audio image created from the Peak Pro 6 Playlist. Note that this is not supported on all CD/DVD writers. • Burn in Simulation Mode - Is great for testing that a CD will burn properly but not useful otherwise. When enabled, this will not actually burn a CD. • Use Buffer Underrun Protection - This should always be on and will be “greyed out” if it is not supported by the CD burner • Burn CD-Text from Playlist - If you are not adding CD Text to a CD leave this unchecked. • Write ISRC codes - If you are not adding ISRC Codes to a CD leave this unchecked. • Leave Session “Open” - By Leaving the session open, you are able to add other content to the Audio CD such as movies, images, or web links from another program like Roxioʼs Toast. • Regions are Tracks - By unchecking this your CD will burn as one long track, it is best to leave this checked. • Markers are Indexes - If you are adding Sub Indexes for one or more tracks on your CD you will need to check this box. Markers in the Source document will be seen as the Indexes. When burning CDs from Peak, I always have Verify After burn, Use Buffer Underrun Protection, and Regions are Tracks enabled, the other options are only used when/if they are needed. Many CD Replication plants are now accepting DDP 2.0 file sets and this has many advantages. The first and most obvious is not having to ship the Master CD to the plant since a DDP file set can be uploaded to a server, this saves time and money. Another advantage is you can avoid any errors from the burnt CDs. To Export a DDP file set from Peak Pro 6 click on the “Bounce Playlist to new audio document” button in the Playlist. When the “Bounce Playlist...” window appears, there will be some options. You will want to set the file format to DDP 2.0 file set, the sample rate will default to 44.1 Page 6

Using the Peak Pro 6 Playlist for CD Mastering. KHz and the Bit Depth to 16, if your source documents are higher than 44.1/16 bit they will be converted. The Dither option is available in the “Bounce Playlist...” window, you will want to change the sample rate conversion quality from within the Peak DSP Preferences. If you have added CDText in the Playlist check the box for “Use CD-Text for naming” to have it show up with the DDP file set. The “Bounce Playlist...” window gives you other options for exporting your Playlist such as AIFF, SDII, Jam Image and an iTunes Playlist. These other options can be used to export your Playlist as a single audio file for archiving or when sending to iTunes, a way to get your project on the iPod/iPhone to listen elsewhere.

Page 7