Hi everyone,

I'm sure that somewhere on the board this has been addressed but I wanted to ask anyway. I need a way to capture audio with a computer that will also allow me to "lay" the wav files out and put track indicators in so that I can burn the whole project to CDR. It would also be nice to be able to do a little bit of volume/compression what have you to allow for some sort of "mastering". I currently have Soundforge which is ok for the compression volume deal but does not have the ability to put track indicators and burn the project over to CD.

The specific issue I have is that I recorded a band that plays all of their songs continuously. That is when they play live they never stop for 45 minutes. The songs are written independently of one another but when they go to play a live show they just have a set that continuously gets updated as new songs are written. Its kind of a cool idea so when they came to record with me and my small analog studio we set up and they banged their set out in 30 minute sessions per real. I simply hit record and they nailed the "meat and potatoes" of it live in one pass. It was pretty impressive. Anyway, now I'm mixing down and they would like for me to be able to put track indicators at the points that the 30 minute chunks transition between one song to another. Given this, I need to be able to insert a track indicators w/o any space.

I know this is a pretty basic issue and I'm sure plenty of software is capable of this but I would still appreciated some suggestions. Also, I have a USB converter for dumping the 2-track stereo into my computer. Its one of thoes M-Audio FastTrack Pro deals. It is ok but not great so any suggestions for replacing this with something better and keeping it under say $500 if possible would be appreciated as well.

Thanks in advance.

A friend at work tells me that Sony CD Architect is quite good for the job of taking a single audio file and adding track markers prior to burning.

As for "mastering", I'd maybe use an audio editor such as Soundforge, or maybe a recording program with additional plugins. There are some ok-ish all-in-one plugins which can do basic mastering functions such as eq. , compression and limiting such as PSP Vintage Warmer (what a crap name). A bit of something like that, followed by normalising would give you a crude, but probably useable result.

For a rough master, or a pretty good one if you play with it a bit, try Izotope ozone. be careful though. its way easy to go completely overboard. i like the multiband compressor for (guess) what you are working with. pretty sure there's a time limited demo, and I'm sure it supports a number of formats........

BadComrade,


Thanks so much that program is perfect for what I need. Now I just need to consider what type of 2-track a/d converter I want to get to replace my cheap-o Fast-Track Pro from M-audio...

I use Steinberg's Wavelab and enjoy it.

I use Apple's Waveburner..

http://www.apple.com/logicstudio/utilities/

seems to work well..

cool edit pro looks pretty neat for this sort of thing.

Sound Forge 9 comes with CD Architect. You could just upgrade to that.
I use CDArch and I love it. The CD you set up is non destructive to the file(s) so you can do tons of editing, fades, etc and change them all you want.

SoundForge and CD Arch is the fucking mutts. The best reason to get a PC for music.