How to divide continuous music into tracks for CD?

Like the subject says, I need to know how to chop up continuous sound into separate tracks. Think about 70's Pink Floyd, for example, where one song crossfades with another, or they're bridged by sound effects, and there are no popints of silence to cut at.

I have Sonar Home Studio 6 & 7, and I can't see a way to do this. I could turn the album, or at least several songs at a time, into one long track, saving several versions and splitting and sliding and saving things to create the tracks. The problem is cutting during music without getting popping sounds and then getting the tracks to sound smoothly continuous on the CD.

Is there CD creation software that can do this this, maybe let me load and layer WAV files and designate where the track numbers change? I used to do this on my late lamented hardware CD recorder, but now I need to do it with software. I've heard a lot about CD Architect, but I haven't quite managed to ascertain whether or not it could do the job. And if a cheaper or free program could do it, even better...;)

Any suggestions on how to create my non-stop epic?

TIA:)

Anything like CD Architect is a Godsend (Did I break the rule regarding talk of religion?). A couple of years ago a girl in the office brought me some DAT tapes from a Grateful Dead show. Now for those of you who don't know, a break for the Dead was when they would feel like it, say once every three or four hours, they would stop playing and go backstage and pig out. no 2 second break between "Songs," they just sort of drift from one "modality of music" into another. Two hours on each tape. So doing it was a nightmare. The thought actually entered my head at one point to take it home, load it onto the mac, and then dump it onto the Ampex, where I can scrub the tape across the heads to find a good place to break off a clip and dump it back into ProTools! And the whole time I'm thinking, jeez, will Beth be offended if I stop Saint Stephen here and start Dark Star right after it ? BTW, Mike knows Beth. Ritter's friend Beth with the Rack.

The happy Ending. The DAT tapes were Golden, as was the show, and Deadheads all over north Florida and Furthur have burned CDs of the show, courtesy of the Florida State Department of Environmental Protection.

What are you using to burn CDs? Many CD-burning applications allow you to insert index markers. If you have that, you have everything you need already.

Just load your songs into a new SONAR project, either all on one track or one per track (I prefer a single track for all). Move them around, apply crossfades where you want one song to run into the next, or just use short fades at the ends and beginnings of clips and insert however much silence you want between songs. Export the whole thing as one big 16-bit file, then load it into your CD-burning app and set the index marks.

ORIGINAL: mike_mccue

This is easily done with CD Architect... I never went looking for another solution... I'm sure there are a few.

good luck,
mike

Yep! that pretty well sums it up for me as well!

Andy

Bitflipper's way has worked well for me - he had a previous thread on doing home-mastering that is very good. The trick seems to be placing the indexes (which apparently most CD burn software has that capability) before at the beginning and then between each song - so one long file of a bunch of songs will then be nicely divided and show up on the CD player as song 1...2...3...etc. The first time I tried to set up a CD and saw the option of inserting "indexes" it scared me, but its really sort of simple to do.

Thanks Bitflipper, I'll check them out:)

Bit,

Do you know if Pyro can be used to apply index markers in contiuous audio; I really could not tell from the product descriptions?

People might think this is a convoluted way to do it, and CD Architect is certainly easier but it's not free and it currently has a bug with writing CD-TEXT (last time I checked).

I like using ImgBurn to burn audio CDs from a Cue Sheet. I would do all my pre-mastering in Sonar and if the final CD was going to be one long file (like in the OP's scenario) I'd import it into Audition and add markers where the tracks go. I'd then use the CueList Tool to generate a cue sheet from the markers in the wav file. After all that, I'd tidy up the cue sheet (CD-TEXT and add UPC and ISRC numbers if needed for commercial release). Finally, burn it with ImgBurn.

It might sound complicated, (although you can just drag wav files into ImgBurn for quickie discs) but when the final product has to be perfect it's been a reliable method for me. And once you get the workflow down it's pretty simple. I just finished a 4 CD set using this method and it went very smoothly.

Edit: Oh yeah. ImgBurn and CueList Tool are free.

Hello Michael,

Now it's a week later and you're still talking about this. I take it the main issue is you don't want to spend the $112 on CD Architect because you only expect to do this once?

You don't want to split the track you only need to drop track markers where each tune starts. This way you can listen to the CD uninterrupted and there are no gaps between the tracks but you can still use the next and previous track buttons to navigate the CD.

If the goal is to complete the project and not invest in CD Architect I can offer you the following. Take your program material and pre-master it the way you want in Sonar. Apply EQ, compression (if necessary) and match the levels of the tunes until you have the (one long) track exactly the way you want it to sound when it is on the CD (continuous, cross-faded or gaps where they need to be). Then export the audio as one long 44.1/16 bit WAV file. Burn this file to a data (not audio) CD and mail it to me along with a listing of the absolute times for the track markers. (My address can be found by following the link to my web site in my signature). I'll wack the track into CD Architect and drop the track markers according to your specification. I'll make a CD ISO image for you to download and burn on a CD to see if it is right. If it's not right I'll make the necessary tweaks and make another ISO image. If it's right, your done.

Are you at the Waverly, NY near Elmira or the Waverly near Bronxville?

GK

ORIGINAL: x2000
tarsier: ImgBurn and CueList might be free, but Audition isn't... Addings the markers is exactly the part of the process that I'm aiming for, dividing one WAV of constant music into many tracks.

Indeed, it's not free--and it's quite a resource hog like all Adobe apps. The last version I really liked was 1.5.

But I totally forgot about CD Wave which is designed to do exactly what you want to do (I think...). It isn't free, but $15 is fairly cheap. And you can try it free for 31 days.

Edit: oh, but you're going with CD Architect. Let us know if it can write CD-Text properly. That's really the only thing that keeps me from using it.

Say - what's copy protection on CDA these days?? I'm a little leery of Sony since the whole rootkit fiasco....

ORIGINAL: x2000

What fiasco is that? Did I miss something or just forget...?

It's a couple years gone by now - here's a brief overview -

http://www.wired.com/politics/security/commentary/securitymatters/2005/11/69601

ORIGINAL: krizrox
The latest version of CD Architect writes CD text just fine.

Hmmm. I was going by this post which was posted just a few days ago, but according to the release notes ISRC writing has been fixed. Can anyone verify that CD-Text is fully operational?

I'm going to be doing this more than once, so I'm going to get CD Architect

Hello x2000,
If you're going to need to do this from time to time you might as well spring for the $88.00 you won't be sorry.

Say - what's copy protection on CDA these days?? I'm a little leery of Sony since the whole rootkit fiasco....

Ricstudioc you are misinformed. The rootkit issue came from Sony Entertainment copy protecting a DVD. The Sony Creative Software products are from the formerly independent software developer called Sonic Foundry (out of Minnesota somewhere). Sonic Foundry was a Sony development partner for Sony's consumer video editor software then Sony acquired the whole company (developers and all) and re-branded the Sonic Foundry line. Sony Creative (Sound Forge, CDA, Vegas, DVDA, Acid and more) are the old Sound Forge products which are still developed independently by the Sound Forge developers. The Sound Forge (now Sony Creative) developers and the Sony Creative products had nothing to do with the DVD protection exploit.

The copy protection on Sony Creative products is a challenge response system. It is not particularly intrusive and it allows multiple installs. CD Architect even with authorization is a benign application.

GK

dude, checkout PYRO. Cheap and effective, if not feature rich... Yes, it can do seamless track markers. -sd