At the risk of asking a dumb question. If master the audio of my tracks, set their relative levels in Sonar, what is missing by making the CD in iTunes?

Never bothered looking at Ozone before as I thought it's pricing would be like it's advanced pricing and was surprised PlugInBoutique sell plain Ozone6 for 130 quid. And looking at the demo was surprised how friendly it looked. The moveable modules reminded me of the PX64

Brett
Ben, how does Soundforge handle multiple files?

Hi Brett...I'm not sure as I have not made a CD in Sound Forge...it seems so quaint...a CD that is.  Personally it should be fine...I know that if you want a simple redbook audio CD, Pyro Audio Creator still works...at least it did last year when I used it last.
 
Ben

Kamikaze
At the risk of asking a dumb question. If master the audio of my tracks, set their relative levels in Sonar, what is missing by making the CD in iTunes?

Nothing, it's a just a matter of work flow.

(I'm not sure exactly what you can do in itunes, there maybe some advanced functionality missing)

BenMMusTech
Hi Brett...I'm not sure as I have not made a CD in Sound Forge...it seems so quaint...a CD that is.  Personally it should be fine...I know that if you want a simple redbook audio CD, Pyro Audio Creator still works...at least it did last year when I used it last.
 
Ben

Here in Japan all bands, especially Indy bands put out CDs which are sold at gigs.

It's not the CD burning that I'm worried about, it's mastering (the audio) of all the tracks together in one session and being able to jump around between tracks. Maybe I'm not explaining that particularly well ;)

Brett

I import all of my finished mixes (exported at 32 bit from each project) into my mastering project.
 
Each song goes onto it's own track and spaced out appropriately along the timeline. Each track gets nudged into place for best flow.
 
Because I mix to K-14, all of my tracks sit happily at 0dB and are all of a similar comparative volume
 
I insert markers art the start of each song so it's quick & easy to simply select a different song by selecting the marker in the Control Bar (Markers) Module.
 
All tracks go to my master bus which has my mastering chain which consists of several T-Racks modules: a bit of light compression, light EQ and a bit of limiting gets the overall levels up to near commercial outputs.
The chain also has Bluecat's metering plugin
 
I then export the album at 16 bit 44.1KHz for importing into Sony's CD Architect for burning.
CDA can set your track indices exactly where you want them and will also add CD text.
 
The 16 bit wav is used for MP3 encoding for which I use the Goldwave editor with free Lame encoder

For mastering a single track I don't find a need to leave Sonar or I can do it in stand alone Ozone 6 Adv.

On the other hand if I have an album to master I put the finished mixed stereo file into Sound Forge 11. I can use the same plugins as in Sonar, but the markers, regions and scripting available make easy work of cutting up a project and making it Red Book compliant. Even if not for CD I can still do multiple scripted processes inside SF11 that Sonar can't touch.

Sure you can master in Sonar if all you're doing is polishing levels and finalising a mix. But if I have a lot of work to do then I use Sound Forge.