[soozmorabito]

Originally Posted by DJ Hellfire

I use pro tools in combo with iTunes. What I do in pro tools is line up all the mastered songs the way I want on separate tracks. Then slide them around to where I want them. If I want the songs gapless and to run from one to the other in one smooth transition or faded into each other, I align them in that way. Once I have them all to where I want hem and all my transitions are smooth, I bounce that entire session down to one audio file. So now I have all my songs in one file with all the perfect transitions I create. I then split the file back up into individual songs again separated at each new song. Once they are separate, I highlight all of them, go to the regions list and export them as audio files. Then rename them all in windows explorer and iTunes. When they playback in iTunes, they playback your transistions perfectly as they were in pro tools with no gaps, pops or clicks. Then burn the playlist in iTunes and you have your gapless album. It's cake. And it works whether you export as wav or mp3. Completely smooth.

I have cd architect too. I was using that at first, but I just didn't like using it for some reason. Works great though. The thing I didn't like about it is when adding the track markers, you have to listen to where the tracks should be separated and keep playing it back to make sure you made the marker in the right spot. But with pro tools, all I have to do is highlight the original track in combination with the bounced track and the beginning of the selection is exacty where my cut needs to go. Don't even have to play it back to make sure it's right because the cut will be at the exact spot the new track starts. Hope you can make sense of that. But I just like that method better than architect, probably mainly for the more flexible screen view as well. I think the only extra step to my method is putting the songs in iTunes to burn. But people should be doin that anyway when they're uploading they're projects for online downloads. Everything seems to be about iPod now. So I like to make my downloads iTunes friendly so the listener doesn't have to spend time renaming my tracks.

But if you're having a knowledgable mastering engineer do your project, you need only to provide him each song file (WAV or AIFF) and tell him how you want it. He should be able to do what you're asking. If not, find someone else.