Hi!
I just finished mastering my all-ardour album (expect it in the made with ardour section soon), and I’m now getting ready to have it made into CDs.
Now the album is continuous, with transitions linking tracks together (like Dark Side of The Moon). Right now I exported it the following way:
set ranges for each song, then give them a CD range tag, and tag each range according to the song
export the whole session in one wav file, with the CD (red Book) preset, generating a CUE file that keeps referring to the one album-length audio file.
Made a DDP with a CLI tool
The cd duplication service (bandcd) told me they do DAO by default with 0 between tracks. Which has me confused. Should I have exported each region individually?
Also if y’all have a trick for testing a DDP I’d love to know.
It’s my first time mastering for CD, so I want it to be perfect.
That sounds odd to me, though mind you I haven’t done much in terms of professional printing of CDs. That being said it is not uncommon, and in fact IIRC Red Book standard is to have 2 seconds between each track, typically silence that a CD player may choose to jump over, but as you have noted some albums choose to ‘hide’ content in there as well.
I certainly have done limited runs using my own burners years ago (Not the same obviously) in just the fashion you describe though.
I suppose informing you about doing DAO is just so you don’t have to export it as one single wav, if you don’t want to.
If they were doing TAO you would get silence between the tracks if you sent them separate files for each section but since they’re DAO you would need to include silence after each track if that’s what you wanted.
But you should talk to them and double check, just to be sure.
ddpinfo from http://ddp.andreasruge.de/ appears to be able to convert a DDP file to a cue/bcwav file which you can burn to a reference CD.
I ended up playing the CUE file used by cue2ddp with VLC to check that everything worked, and checked the output of cue2ddp on the CLI to make sure everything seemed good!