Burning CD's, Bias Peak, Jam, Masterlist??

[seeds]

Robby,
I started with Masterlist CD then missed the graphical view, so I bought Waveburner.

But last week I was at a mastering facility working with the guy who has mastered everyone from Lynard Skynard to the Stone Temple Pilots, and he was using masterlist CD on a plextor cd burner for the final red book masters going to the manufacturer.

http://www.rodneymills.com

MLCD does give you a lot of good information with timing PQ and such for the manufacturer.

Jeff

[Robby Hamilton]

Cool, are you saying that maybe Masterlist will give a better product?

I too like the graphic view to see my production.

Do you use wave burner for mastering or just for CD layout? Do you master in Protools?

Thanks
Robby

[seeds]

I don't do mastering and I think that either will burn a CD the same as long as the settings are right (waveburner will take up to 96Hz / 24 and auto convert to 44.1/16).

Ease of use, MLCD a little easier, but no graphic editing.

[letrev]

I've used MLCD but switched to Waveburner Pro for the graphic control of crossfades primarily. I couldn't get used to setting crossfades by adjusting start/end times and setting crossfade values numerically. Just makes more sense to me to draw my fades, esp. since I do it all day inside of PT. Strange to me that digi would make PT so graphic and MLCD so un-graphic!

[seeds]

Yeah that is true, I never had luck with MLCD crossfades.

But I do beleive MLCD still gives you more for
'mastering' / manufacturing in that it will do cool printouts of all the PQ time code and such.

[davip]

Jam gives you all the PQ printouts and is much easier to use than MLCD.

[Jonathan Gordon]

Jam is easy and quick to use and supports the CD/RW drives in Quicksilver G4s. It works quite well without making an image file. I use it constantly to make client reference disks.

However, Jam 5.0 has been set up so that it will only burn copy protected CDs. I continue to use Jam 2.6 for that reason.

I also recommend using 15 frame offsets (Jam defaults to no offsets). If presented with a sound file or region shorter than 4 seconds, Jam will ALWAYS pad it out to 4 seconds. To the best of my knowledge Jam does not support tracks with no index (i.e. hidden tracks) nor will it support multiple indexes within a track (necessary for inserting indexes in continuous live program, for example). Also, if you try to drop an interleaved sdii file into Jam where the filename ends in a number, Jam will get confused and not install it correctly.

For these reasons, I don't consider Jam suitable for mastering.

MLCD, on the other hand, is clunky to use, requires floppy authorization, will only burn reliably from an image file, and only supports certain SCSI burners. However, it handles hidden tracks and multiple indexes, as well as a number of other esoteric functions. It will deal just fine with file regions shorter than 4 seconds, although, paradoxically, it cannot read FILES shorter than 4 seconds, only REGIONS.

MLCD does not support CD-text. DO NOT be fooled by the fact that you can edit titles on the PQ page- This information is NOT burned into the CD.

I use MLCD on my old G3 system with a venerable old Yamaha CDR-100 at 2X speed for mastering, and I haven't had a master rejected yet.

Waveburner Pro is supposed to be very good, and is the only Mac program I know of that supports CD-text, but I do not have any experience with it.

Hope this is of some help.

Regards,

JG

[Robby Hamilton]

Thanks for the input. That is helpfull.

[Robby Hamilton]

Hi all, What program should I be mastering with? Protools? or the other programs I mentioned?

I ahve been useing Samplitude on PC but I am going Mac. Is there anything like Samplitude on the Mac?

If there are FAQ's on this could someone please point me?

Thanks
Robby Hamilton

[beatboy]

Your using the best mastering tool already. All you need past that is a way to position track start, ends & burn.