best medium to master from

  • Thread starter Thread starter jugalo180
  • Start date Start date
jugalo180

jugalo180

www.moneyistherecipe.com
this was from an article i dug up at getsigned.com. i would like you guys to tell me what your professional opinion is on the subject.

Q) I was told that if I give somebody an audio CD that it can be mastered. is this legit? if so, is there a better format than an audio CD (such as DAT, etc.) to give an engineer that is to master a project? - Clay

A) Here’s my preferred quality list (always assuming that with anything digital the higher the bit rate the better - and the better the A-D and D-A converters the better):

1. Analog tape
2. Bring in the computer
4. Masterlink direct from the mix buss (digital or analog)
3. Data files
5. DATs, good vinyl
6. Audio CDs
7. Cassettes, MiniDiscs

Audio CDs, while not ideal, can be excellent to master from, but just not ideal. If the music’s good, the average listener won’t care what the mix format is. They’ll just like the music, and they won’t have 2 different versions to compare the sound of anyway! So remember, it’s about the music, not the numbers. Enjoy the process and make known the unknown! Express the unexpressed and keep the heart in the beat!

Peace and best wishes, John Vestman
Click to expand...
 
The problem with audio CDs is that they've already been reduced (in one oway or another) to 44.1K/16-bt. A data CD, OTOH, has no limitation in that regard. You can put higher resolution files on there to master from. IMHO, giving a mastering barn anything shorther than 24-bit is doing yourself a disservice.

"Bring in the computer" is a wasted idea. The files on a burnt data disc need be no different than the files on your hard drive, an exact bit-by-bit clone.

G.
 
Another thing is that audio CDs dispense with parity data used to preserve the integrity of the file. Data CDs don't.


sl
 
cool, thanks guys for the much needed replies. what i've learned so far is shop for data discs and burn the wave files as data files am i correct?
 
jugalo180 said:
cool, thanks guys for the much needed replies. what i've learned so far is shop for data discs and burn the wave files as data files
Click to expand...
I'm not sure what you mean by "shop for data discs". If you are implying that you believe that there is a difference between the recordable discs used for data files and those used for audio discs, there isn't. A CD-R is a CD-R is a CD-R...in that regard, anyway. The difference is how you set your burning software. Depending on your software it can be located in different places, but somewhere there should be a seeting where it asks you if you want to burn an audio disc or a data disc. Just select the data disc option and the software takes care of the rest.

G.
 
jugalo180 said:
cool, thanks guys for the much needed replies. what i've learned so far is shop for data discs and burn the wave files as data files am i correct?
Click to expand...

I'd check with whatever mastering facility you plan to use to see what kind of formats they accept. A lot of them will be able to work from just about anything, and there'd be a huge advantage to having 24 bit data files of your mixes if you're able to provide that as well.

The tradeoff is higher file sizes. (24 bit *plus* parity data)

As for CD media, I think anything around the level of Mitsumi or so would be ok - again, the mastering facility you work with might offer some suggestions or have a preference for discs. I like the black ones myself.


sl
 
If you mix to tape send in the tape!!

As you are likely mixing ITB you have several options according to who is doing the mastering.

Data files are de riguer and quite a few pros send a PT file with the mix and mix stems to the mastering house.

Personally...I would rather suck snot from a corpse than let a mastering engineer near my stems but to each his own.

:eek: :eek:


Remember NOT to alter the files you send...give the ME exactly what you printed and do include notes and concerns for each track. The ME is not a mind reader so don't be shy to tell them where you are coming from and what problems you feel are in need of addressing.(It's going to be the low end BTW!!!Hehehehehe...)


Cheers,
Aardvark
 
SouthSIDE Glen said:
I'm not sure what you mean by "shop for data discs". If you are implying that you believe that there is a difference between the recordable discs used for data files and those used for audio discs, there isn't. A CD-R is a CD-R is a CD-R...
Click to expand...
Actually, that's not quite true -- I don't know if they're still doing it, but there used to be a number of consumer products that would only use "Music CDs". These CD-Rs designated for "Music" were a half-brained attempt (like SCMS was) at stopping digital copying. They force the recorders to only accept these "Music CDs" which basically had the copybit preburned to ON, and they would charge a premium price (by misleading the consumer into thinking that CDs marked "For Music" were somehow better than standard CD-Rs...) It was a pretty silly concept for the most part....
 
Blue Bear Sound said:
I don't know if they're still doing it, but there used to be a number of consumer products that would only use "Music CDs". These CD-Rs designated for "Music" were a half-brained attempt (like SCMS was) at stopping digital copying. They force the recorders to only accept these "Music CDs" which basically had the copybit preburned to ON, and they would charge a premium price (by misleading the consumer into thinking that CDs marked "For Music" were somehow better than standard CD-Rs...) It was a pretty silly concept for the most part....
Click to expand...

I've read about people duping their machines. Some of these units that had a manual way to release the door could be loaded with a blank music CD-R. Once the machine reads the disc and goes into its ready state, they'd extend the tray manually and swap for a data CD-R - then the machine would do the burn. Not all machines could do it.

Also much like cassette tape, music CD-R media are supposed to have a slight royalty content to the price. The argument is that CD-Rs are used to copy commercial music CDs. That's just fine, but it also means that if someone's recording their own original music, they're paying royalties to someone else for it.

The media itself isn't really any different, but data CD-Rs are also available as very low quality items. Sometimes they don't load properly into all machines and can't be read. Especially by cheap or older CD players as music discs, but sometimes even computers as data discs.

Something like that anyway.


sl
 
Blue Bear Sound said:
Actually, that's not quite true -- I don't know if they're still doing it, but there used to be a number of consumer products that would only use "Music CDs". These CD-Rs designated for "Music" were a half-brained attempt (like SCMS was) at stopping digital copying
Click to expand...
What I'm referring to is the blank media itself. A typical spindle of 700MB/80min CD-Rs are not designated as "data CD-Rs" or "music CD-Rs". They can be and are used either way, that it's just a matter of what data format the software chooses to write to them. In fact, the fact that the CD-Rs are labeled both data capacity (e.g. 700MB) and time (e.g. 80min.) measurements is an indication right there that they are catering to both formats.

That was the only point I was trying to make, Bruce. It sounded as though Jugalo may have been under the impression that data CD-Rs and audio CD-Rs had to be pressed to specific types of CD-R media designed for that specific format, and I just wanted to allay him of such a thought.

Now, as to whether the machines on the receiving end will give trouble one way or another is, as you say, another story. I would guess, though, that it was more of an issue, say, two years ago than it is these days, though that admittedly is a guess.

G.
 
there is a good article in last months SOS about the mastering process.
 
wow, all good points guys. thanks for the shared wisdom. as for the data cd's i just remember my father-in-law, whom is one of those tech saavy's going to circuit city looking for data discs. i questioned why he was passing up all of those cd-r's and he told me that they weren't the same as getting the discs made specifically for data. it didn't make any sense to me, but it remained in the back of my mind.
 
Apogee makes a special kind of CD designed for mastering. I can't remember the name, but you can find it either on thier website or some place like guitar center.

You can actually burn at 24bit - 96khz (from something like a masterlink) to then bring it to the mastering engineer. It actually gives it a 3db boost as well, so you have nothing to lose from it. Except maybe the price tag.

Probably still worth the one-timeness of mastering.
 
jugalo180 said:
wow, all good points guys. thanks for the shared wisdom. as for the data cd's i just remember my father-in-law, whom is one of those tech saavy's going to circuit city looking for data discs. i questioned why he was passing up all of those cd-r's and he told me that they weren't the same as getting the discs made specifically for data. it didn't make any sense to me, but it remained in the back of my mind.
Click to expand...

I wonder if he was talking about the difference between CD-R and CD-RW :confused: .
 
snow lizard said:
Another thing is that audio CDs dispense with parity data used to preserve the integrity of the file. Data CDs don't.


sl
Click to expand...

Actually audio CDs just use a different type of error checking using CRC. See C1/C2 errors.

If you have a program that extracts data from an audio CD using the proper error checking (like Plextools) there should be no difference between audio CDs and DAT tape (also assuming no errors on xfer).
 
SouthSIDE Glen said:
What I'm referring to is the blank media itself. A typical spindle of 700MB/80min CD-Rs are not designated as "data CD-Rs" or "music CD-Rs".
Click to expand...
Actually they are. If it doesn't say 'music' on it ....... then it won't work on consumer level component CD burners. The difference is simply that 'music' CD's have some small file on them that identifies them as 'music' and tells the burner it's all right to use it.
Most of ya'll do your work on a 'puter so it never comes up. But I'm mostly analog with component burners like a Pioneer and stuff like that so I have to use 'music' discs.
My Masterlink, of course, is perfectly happy with a 'data' disc so I've gotten to where I mostly use it.
But the 'music' discs aren't that much more expensive ...... just a little harder to find.
 
Lt. Bob said:
Actually they are. If it doesn't say 'music' on it ....... then it won't work on consumer level component CD burners.
Click to expand...
Yeah, all six people who bought or use those things may have to worry about that. For the real world of home recording and larger it's just not an issue.

G.
 
masteringhouse said:
Actually audio CDs just use a different type of error checking using CRC. See C1/C2 errors.
Click to expand...


It'd be interesting to read more on it if you have any good links.

My low budget, layman's understanding of it is that data CDs have far more robust error correction. Audio CDs interleave parity bits in a stream, so there is redundant data present to help with certain types of read errors from light scratches & such. Data files have a much more complicated implementation of the same sort of thing, where the parity data is organized in a table with a number of bytes. 80 minutes of 16/44.1 stereo .wav files on a computer or data CD will weigh in over 700 megabytes. Put it on an audio CD and it shrinks. The actual audio files are identical, but the difference is the redundant parity data being stripped out. If a few sectors become unreadable on the disk for some reason, the data CD stands a much better chance of recreating the lost data accurately.

masteringhouse said:
If you have a program that extracts data from an audio CD using the proper error checking (like Plextools) there should be no difference between audio CDs and DAT tape (also assuming no errors on xfer).
Click to expand...

There's a freeware program called EAC (Exact Audio Copy) authored by some German guy that doesn't like errors when he rips audio CDs. It can read drive parameters and tell you (along with other things) if your CD drive is capable of dealing with C2 or not. (The only drive I have that does is my Plextor burner, so this is obviously the best one for doing a rip. I've checked 3 other drives including another burner - no C2) It deals with things like head offset as well. There's about a million settings in this thing, but you can get it to do a CD rip in anywhere from a few minutes (depending on your drive) to several hours in the case of badly damaged disks. If it runs into a problem like the CRC checksums don't jive or something, it can keep reading a damaged area repeatedly (changing speeds, etc...). It stores the results and compares them against each other. If it can't resolve the error completely, it'll take its best guess from the law of averages and give you the location of the error in a log file. You can set it to avoid this kind of tedium, but you might not get an exact audio copy.

I'm sure the Plextools stuff is pretty slick, but I've never used it.


sl
 
But none of this has anything to do with the discs themselves ...... these differences are in the files and software associated with the different types of files. The actuall discs themselves are no different at all other than the music discs having a file on them that lets a 'music' burner use them.
So if 'data files' are more robust than audio files ...... the difference in in the type of files and everything associated with that and not with the discs themselves.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top