Export to wav for CD

[al_F]

Using Ardour 7.0.0 on Manjaro KDE I just finished a session of about 36 minutes. Then I exported to wav with the CD (Red Book) settings:

In case of trouble seeing the image, settings are Normailze to peak, export to wav 44.1 kHz 16 bit with shaped noise dithering.

To my surprise Ardour’s loudness analyst says the resulting file is NOT compatible with CD:

Can that be right?

[Headwar (Edouard S.)]

You normalized to 0 dBFS Peak, CD/DVD asks for -0.1 true peak. The Loudness Analysis and Normalizer can help you by correcting the gain in the Master bus.

Regards

[al_F]

Thanks for pointing me to the manual, I’ll use that tool!

That said, I think the Ardour CD Red Book preset for normalization at export should also be at -0,1 true peak instead of zero (can’t remember tinkering with those settings).

[peter.zenk]

Some time ago I read the recommendation to put a brick wall limiter on the mix bus with - 0.4 db as the very last element. So I’m still doing this as of today, although not sure if this still is the state of the mixing art.

[al_F]

I got an extra question for this topic:

I assume the file format “BWF” is the broadcast wave file format, which I understand can hold more metadata than a standard WAV file.

Yet when I choose export to BWF the “Tag file with metadata” option is greyed out, while when choosing WAV (CD Red Book) as seen in the screenshot above, the option can be selected.

Shouldn’t that be the other way round?

Checking the exported files with Picard, the tags are attached to the Red Book wav file, but not to the bwav export.

[Headwar (Edouard S.)]

Metadatas in BWF are not your typical MP3 Metadatas (Artist, etc…) but metadatas for computer use like timecode etc…