'Clicks' on CDs

G

glynb

Balladeer
I recently got my album mastered by a friend of mine. I t was amazing how many 'clicks' I hadn't noticed before became apparent during the mastering process.

Most had been added when i burnt the original CD audio disk, presumably by my PC or more than likely a result of using cheepo white label disks.

Fortunately i always burn several copies of each mix to different CDs at different times before deleting the mix from the hard drive, so i was able to go back to earlier instances of the mixes to find a 'good' copy with no click.

On one particular song though the click was there in all cases and my friend said it was more than likely on the original track and made its way through the mix unnoticed. Facing having to go back to the original 16 tracks and redo a part he in desperation tried the Cubase fix-nasty-clicks pluggin, or whatever the proper name is for it. And it worked, no more click! Damned clever.

He ran off two copies of the finished mastered album for replication, but i haven't listened through yet to check for errors. I'm worried about hearing more clicks, and clicks where there aren't any! Ah well, has to be done i guess.

In future i shall buy only good quality CDs to burn my mixes. Just thought I'd share this experience with others.
 
Are you saying that you burned a redbook CD to give to the mastering house? Wouldn't it have been better to supply 24-bit masters (or 16-bit, if that's all you have) on a CD-R data disc? The CD data format is more robust than the redbook audio format, AFAIK.

To make it very clear, let me put it this way: Your friend should not have had to "rip" the audio from your CD to get it into his system. With a data CD, it's just a file copy operation.
 
Yeh, my friend said he would have preferred data files (WAVs).
It's a bit of a long story. i use a fostex vf160 16 track portastudio, and the version of the software I have doesn't allow for exporting of WAV files, so my only option was to burn the mixes as CD Audio and give him that, hence the write errors.

Incidently, it is possible to upgrade the vf160 sw to export WAVs, but to do that I need a SCSI zip drive and i haven't got round to getting one yet, noone I know has one.

For the next album I'll upgrade so i can export WAVs for mastering.
 
Yes, as i said in the first post, he managed to clean up one using a Cubase plugin, worked a treat. As to the others we were able to get copies without the clicks from previous burns to CD, so no need to fix, but just one song thst clicks were present on all copies so he did the Cubase thing.

As you've probably realised he ain't a professional mastering house, I can't afford that, limited budget. But all things considered he did a fair job.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top