As far as I can tell it's not possible to dither in Sony CD-A. So I don't know how to go about doing that. My last step is burning from CD-A. It ain't gonna work if it's not 16-bit. But like I said in the previous post, my disc sounds fine. I don't hear any distortion or anything.

I think that my CD player hates me.

I had my laptop (Vista) at work last night. That's the machine that I’m using to record my music and burn discs with using Sonar HS 6 and CD Architect. The disc that I made last night sounded great on my laptop. I used a CD-RW. But it wouldn’t play on my home stereo. I have a Kenwood CD jukebox at home (probably about 15 years old). I can't get any disc that I burn from my laptop to play in that CD jukebox at home. It fully hates CD-RW's. So I switched to CD-R’s for the rest of my burning attempts. I tried burning from WAV and MP3 but they won't play.

I also have a desktop PC (XP Pro) that I used to use to burn discs. I have Musicmatch on there. I tried burning a disc from WAV on my desktop PC and that wouldn't work. I tried burning from MP3 from my desktop PC and that DID play on my player. So apparently my player is a little nervous about formatting and encoding. But ALL of the discs that I burned (CD-R’s and CD-RW’s) would play on the CD boom box stereo in my dining room as well as on my computers. Weird.

Since the only disc that would play on my CD jukebox player was the MP3 disc that I did from my desktop PC I tried burning from MP3 on the laptop. No good. THEN I tried installing CD Architect on my desktop PC and tried burning from MP3 using that. That disc wouldn't play on any player. The computer won't even read it. I don't know what's up with that. That seems like a whole other mess that I don't even wanna get into.

I don’t know if it’s just that the jukebox is really limited as far as what type of media it’ll play or if it’s Vista or a drive setting. I just don’t know. I tried burning at different speeds too. I went through about 10 CD-R’s today trying all different ways of burning discs. It’s crazy.

This stuff is hard to learn. But I'm gonna figure it out either by tips from dudes on boards like this or on my own. And I'm gonna post my success story when I do make it happen and explain how I made it all work for the benefit of the next dude that goes through this.

Another choice for basic CD burning is burnatonce, http://www.burnatonce.net/. It does both audio and data, just burning ~ no processing or effects, but it is free. Tracklists can be written to and imported from .m3u files. Has worked very well for me for couple of years now on XP - have not tried it on Vista though.

ORIGINAL: losguy
Basically, the rule of thumb is to do normalization, fading etc. first, and dither to 16 bits last. That final wav would then be what gets burned.

Turns out that you can dither in CD Architect. I'm still learning. So I'll definitely take your tip and try this out. And the dithering plug-in has more options in CD A compared to Sonar HS 6 so I think it's gonna be even cooler.

Yup, that's right. You can try different dither shapes and spectral profiles, too. On shape, triangular is better than rectangular IMO, but sometimes Gaussian sounds better! For spectral profile, the POWr-3 built into SONAR is pretty good in most cases (at least for me). I don't know what CDA offers in that department.

I've found these product descriptions for CD A 5.2 on a couple different sites:

General Editing

32-bit, 192kHz source audio support

Use the highest quality audio in your CD projects, up to 32-bit, 192kHz source audio – no conversion necessary.

Import audio formats other than 16 bit, 44.1kHz (CD quality), and CD Architectâ„¢ software will resample the media to your project's sample rate and perform dithering with advanced noiseshaping

So it sounds like it DOES just transparently convert your files before you burn. I sent a question into support to confirm this.

Word. I think I hear crickets chirping over here and it's the middle of the winter. I'm not getting a response from Sony support. I hear that's common. I'm not gonna hold my breath. I'm gonna just try to burn a project this week after I'm done working and see how it goes.