mastering to cd

[protech]

Hi,

We need to master our new album to CD for sending of to a duplication company.
Pretty straight forward, but we have noticed that when burning the tracks to
a CD for mastering, that sometimes it seems that the occasional 'click' may
appear on tracks when we come to verify the CD is ok. These are only minor clicks
and artefacts but we are aware they were not present on the orriginal tracks
prior to burning and we are concerned this may effect the quality of the
duplicates that the duplication company will poroduce for us.
None of the tracks exceed -1db peak so we know that any clicks and errors are
generated in the burning process.

We understand that burning audio CD's for mastering from at home is not the
best way and we are also aware that it is apparently good practice to use hi quality
CD's and burn at a slow speed to reduce any errors.

So what we want to achieve is the best quality master CD that we can produce
in our limitied studio enviroment. Which leads on to our main questions...

1: Any tips on creating the best mastering CD possible using a PC and Nero?

2: If we create several mastering CD's is there any software that can rescan
the CD's and produce details of the number of errors on a CD so we could compare
which CD's/burning speed produces the best quality master with the lowest amount of
errors?


Maybe we are being to fussy but we need to make sure we present the duplication
company with the best quality CD master we can.

Cheers guys

 

[Fishybob]

I don't blame you being fussy at all. You must'v eworked hard on it and you don't want to settle now.

Personally, I burn everything at -2db to be sure and this works fine for me.

The main reason I'm chipping in is because it's only good practise to burn CD's slow if the CD's themselves are were intended to be burned that way. I was told on this forum a while back, that cheap CD's with fast speeds advertised on them tend to do better at that speed... may not be true but it's always worked for me.

Also worth adding (although you've probably tried) is to listen to the mix on headphones prior to burning as this method will show up clicks and pops alot more obviously that most speakers.

I hope you manage to get it sorted.

 

[protech]

thanks for your response - anyone have any ideas for a bit of software to verifiy the integrity of the audio recorded (as mentioned above)

 

[guitar junkie]

thanks for your response - anyone have any ideas for a bit of software to verifiy the integrity of the audio recorded (as mentioned above)

this is just a recording forum and you might do much better if you go to the mixing and mastering forum and ask there.