First off, I am mostly doing the "compiling" for the CD's. I am doing nothing in the way of level optimiztion, eq, or any other "sweetening" processes that CD's normally go through in the mastering stage these days.
This comp CD is supposed to be an "as-is" collection to sort of "show off" each submitters work in their environment.
Having had past experiences with weird pop's and click's with files that end suddenly, I make it a habit to at least do a very quick fade to digital black at the end of music content before the file actually ends. That, and making sure that each song has about 500ms of silence at the beginning of the track are the only two things I aimed to do on this comp CD. What ended up happening was that many submission had fade out's, even if it was just the fade out of a reverb trail, that went all the way to the end of the file. To my ears, with the audio cranked up to a moderate level, under headphones, these fades usually sounded like they went from having sound, to nothing. Many just didn't "fade out" to nothing like they should. I am not sure if it was just lack of attention by the submitters, or possibly the submitters monitoring system and/or D/A converters having too much noise to notice it, or if this was intended by the submitters. In any of the cases, from out experience from the last comp CD, me and Slackmaster knew that some attention should be paid to the submissions before a master disk was authored.
The submissions were the fade out resolution was pretty bad, meaning that the audio seems to just END without a very smooth fade, it was neccesary to apply another fade to the audio, usually right over the top of the fade that was there to have it end sooner. It is obvious that I cannot "extend" a fade out eh?
My aim was to not effect the fade out drastically, and to hopefully do a fade that matched the "feel" of the song.
As to song ordering. It is not done based on production quality, level matching, genre, or any other type of "matching" scheme. I just put songs in order that seem to have a decent musical flow. It would be very easy to find fault in the decisions I made depending upon your own preferences in such matters. Please feel free to have at it when you recieve your disk! But, I feel the flow worked out okay. There are some transitions where the volume levels dont' match very well at all, but I didn't let that sway the decision.
All the work was done in Wavelab 4. Nothing special done. Just a little clean up editing and applied fade in and fade out where needed. The disk authoring was done in Wavelab and burned from the providing burning engine in the software. All the master burns were done at 1X speed on a Plextor CDRW drive. If the past several disks I have authored for duplication are any indication, the BLERS (block error rates) should be well below the max duplication houses allow on master disks.
I talked about adding 500ms of silence to beginning of each track. This was done so that when you hit the "Next" button on your CD player that when the next song starts, you have a breif moment of silence, and none of the song is chopped off from the buffers in the CD player filling up. This is a prudent approach I take in authoring disks. Some might find that the space inbetween songs is possibly too long. Generally, there is anywhere from 2-3.5 seconds of silence between songs (this is assuming that you are in a listening environment that is quiet enough to hear the full fade out of the song before. Many modern "rock" genre CD's move along a little faster than this, but I wanted the comp CD to have a little slower pace, and wanted to make sure that each song stood on it's own. This is sort of a "old school" approach to authoring disks, allowing a good amount of space between each song, but for this compilation, I felt it worked out very well. There are no cross fades between any songs at all.
It is tempting to talk about my impressions concerning the production decisions made by submitters, but at this point in time, I don't feel "safe" enough talking about that in any specific terms. I will just say that the overall quality of production on this compilation is a bit better than the first comp CD.
Hope you all enjoy the CD.
I am off. Later.
Ed
