Clipped Starts On DVD Player

I don't understand what's happening here... I have a "system" I use to deal with this and it's always worked until this song.

Here's the scenario:

I have found that on some players (CD) but more common and extreme on DVD players. It seem that I cannot simply start a song tight to it's beginning and must leave some zero-volume time prior to the first note of a song. If I don't do this, I find the note gets clipped in some players... So I leave a 15 frame (0.5 sec) space at the front of the project... when it gets exported it causes the dvd player's engine to open and all notes get heard (I hate the time that must be used as often a very short gap between songs is desired).

But in this song?

The song begins with a thick, hard rock guitar lick performed in stereo, so it's of reasonable volume.

I am mastering the mixed wavefile so only one stereo track exists...

I am using the Console Emulator on both the track and the Master bus (respective versions of emulator) and the Concrete Limiter (Master only) as the last item on the path...

I trim the clip so that it's somewhat tight to the first note but with a fraction-of-second bit of the silence still there.

I add a fade in that runs from the clip beginning half way to the first note.

I move the clip so that the clip beginning is at 15 frames...

Then after setting the rest of my mastering, I do a file export of the whole track (not just the clip) there by adding that extra 1/2 second of quiet, empty time for the DVD players to identify and open their' engines....

This has always worked for me, but not on this song. Regardless of how long I leave in (honestly I haven't tried it with more than 1 second of original-clip's audio/silence) the first note is still getting clipped... This is most frustrating...

There is a feature in my burning software (Sony CD Architect) that places auto-fades at boundaries, but I long ago disabled that...

I must be misunderstanding the needs of the DVD player but I can't think of what else to try... In a few minutes I will add a ridiculous amount of time.... maybe a few seconds... but I hate wasting so many cd's! ;-(

Can anyone shed any light on this for me? Any ideas?

Much Thanks...
Keni

Bristol_Jonesey


I started to answer this last night before the forum went down, so I'll try again.

Burning a CD to Red Book standard requires that a gap of exactly 2 seconds must be in place before the "start" of the first song.

In CD Architect you can see your first song and if necessary, nudge it into place.
You'll probably have to zoom in really tightly to get it right.

I trim the clip so that it's somewhat tight to the first note but with a fraction-of-second bit of the silence still there.

I add a fade in that runs from the clip beginning half way to the first note.

This worries me slightly. Are you sure the fade isn't truncating the onset of the music?

I would simply slip-edit the front of clip so that the initial transient lines up perfectly

Hi Bristol Jonesey...
 
Yes, I know I have the 2sec gap between songs, but this is after that.... I've found over the years that is a clip's sound begins too close to the actual start of the clip, some DVD players will clip playback of the audio... So I then started adding 1/2 second of silence within the audio clip itself at the very front... this solved the problem for me for years it seems...
 
Now I do that with this one song (#15 on the disc) and the player clips the beginning of the audio now over 1 full second into the audio clip... I don't understand what the problem is this time as my nomal fix for such doesn't seem to be working... the song starts off with good, solid parts, they're not low in gain or fading in...
 
Somewhat confusing... I'm gonna try the discs on other players and see what's going on.... Maybe an issue with my own DVD player that I don't want to know about? ;-)
 
Thanks for the assist...
 
Keni
 

Yes, Thanks...

I know about the 2sec gap for the first song. I also leave a 2sec gap between all others... and I then leave another gap WITHIN the clip in order to deal with the starting on such players....

Today I hope to have access to a few other players and see if it's only mine???

Thanks Again...
Keni