SOS Mastering article...

This paragraph seems completely off to me:

As mentioned earlier, a multitrack host allows you to do tricks that may be difficult with a dedicated digital audio editing program. This is particularly true with dance music, where you have a continuous stream of sound. It's easy to create crossfades, for example, either using an automatic crossfade function where overlapping two tracks creates a crossfade, or by having the tunes on separate tracks and adding fades manually. You can also dedicate a separate track for transitions or sound effects when doing a dance mix, add track automation to bring effects in and out (to increase a high-pass filter's cutoff as a song fades, for instance, so it seems to disappear just before the next track comes in), and so on. This process essentially creates a 'meta-mix' where, instead of mixing individual tracks to create a two-track file, you're mixing two-track files to create a final album.
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In fact that is exactly what Wavelab (and I assume the others) is really good at doing, and as you go along doing that sort of thing, you are also dropping in track markers so your CD is ready to burn when you're done. And then it burns the CD for you!
 
mshilarious said:
This paragraph seems completely off to me:



In fact that is exactly what Wavelab (and I assume the others) is really good at doing, and as you go along doing that sort of thing, you are also dropping in track markers so your CD is ready to burn when you're done. And then it burns the CD for you!
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interesting... thanks for pointing that out :)
 
It's worth noting that in old school terminology, a 'dedicated digital audio editing program' would be a two track editor such as Dyaxis. I have no idea when the author of this program last looked around, but I don't think you'll find a dedicated editor anymore - everything does multi-track nowadays...
 
It was published back in August 2004 so is quite out of date considering the speed at which hardware and software develop. But I thought that some of what was being said helped me a little to better understand Mastering. I've been reading quite a bit over the last couple of days...
 
Anderton is a generally respectable author, and this was written in 2004 (which wasn't THAT long ago, Wavelab did that stuff since at least v3), which is why this earlier paragraph makes little sense:

Most mastering is done with specialised digital audio editing programs such as Sonic Foundry Sound Forge, Steinberg Wavelab, Bias Peak, Adobe Audition, and so on. These offer good navigation facilities, the ability to zoom in on waveforms, pencil tools to draw out clicks, and plug-ins for mastering tasks (along with the ability to host third-party plug-ins). However, if your requirements aren't too demanding, there are several ways to master using conventional multitrack recording programs. And, interestingly, some can even do tricks conventional digital audio editors can't.
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Audition isn't usually on the short list of mastering programs, and many of the really big boys were left out. Then he goes on to specify sequencers as the multitrack programs he was talking about, and mentions Cubase and Sonar.

There probably are lots of nifty tricks sequencers can do, but the tricks mentioned clearly aren't the domain of sequencers alone.

The article doesn't even mention CD burning, which seems a fairly critical part of the process to me, and that might be a "trick" sequencers aren't too good at.
 
He does briefly mention Roxio :-

If you process and render one track at a time, you can use a dedicated audio CD-burning utility such as Roxio's Toast With Jam to compile them into a finished CD, complete with advanced features such as CD Text.
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but you'd probably miss it cos it's just underneath a screen shot
 
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