What happens when you master?

T

TheloniusMonk

New member
Please forgive me for the stupidity of the question, but im new to this..

Lets say you have the wav files from a home recording session, and you give them to a professional studio to master...

Will they simply take your original wav files, tweek them and edit them with software, and then create a new wav file that I could burn to a disk myself?

Or will mastering simply give me an audio cd without any change to the wav files themselves?

How would you then replicate these CDs without having to rely on the studio to do it for me?

In the past, I've just burn mp3 or wav to a CD at home, but I assume mastering changes the rules of the game and the format completely, am I right?

Thanks..
 
They should do whatever you want. It's part of the process of negotiating with the mastering house.

They will either provide you with a set of mastered WAVs or a Redbook-compliant CD.

If you get the WAV files you can burn CDs yourself.

If you gtet a CD you can burn your own copies, or send it away for replication or duplication.
 
gecko zzed said:
They should do whatever you want. It's part of the process of negotiating with the mastering house.

They will either provide you with a set of mastered WAVs or a Redbook-compliant CD.

If you get the WAV files you can burn CDs yourself.

If you gtet a CD you can burn your own copies, or send it away for replication or duplication.
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Thanks gecko.. you've always been cool about answering my questions, appreciate it!

One followup:

Is there any advantage or disadvantage to the 2 formats you mentioned?

If you use the mastered wav files to burn it at home, will your resulting audio CD be as good as if you sent a redbook compliant CD away to be replicated?

Also, If you sent away the master CD to be replicated, you would have nothing left, and if they lost it, you'd be screwed!

I have a lot of concerns..
 
TheloniusMonk said:
Thanks gecko.. you've always been cool about answering my questions, appreciate it!

One followup:

Is there any advantage or disadvantage to the 2 formats you mentioned?

If you use the mastered wav files to burn it at home, will your resulting audio CD be as good as if you sent a redbook compliant CD away to be replicated?

Also, If you sent away the master CD to be replicated, you would have nothing left, and if they lost it, you'd be screwed!

I have a lot of concerns..
Click to expand...

I'll continue to be cool in answering your questions in that case.

If your ME provides you with a set of WAV files to burn at home, your resulting home-burnt audio CD will have the same audio quality as the one you would get from the ME. It may not be Redbook compliant unless you have a burning program that does this. However, even this is not a big deal. I've sent non-Redbook CDs of for replication without problem.

Yes . . . if you sent away the master CD and it got lost, you would be screwed. So don't send it away. Instead, get the ME to send you a couple of master CDs. Or burn a copy of the master CD and send that instead.

There is no difference in audio between burnt or replicated CDs. However, replicated CDs are more durable. Burnt CDs will not work on some players, and (in my view) seem to be more susceptible to damage.
 
I might want to put some of these up on myspace or a website, as well as distribute them as a CD to different venues... so I would ideally like both formats!

I guess as you suggested in another forum, I could rip them off the Audio CD without loss of sound quality..

What utility do you suggest to do this?
 
TheloniusMonk said:
I might want to put some of these up on myspace or a website, as well as distribute them as a CD to different venues... so I would ideally like both formats!

I guess as you suggested in another forum, I could rip them off the Audio CD without loss of sound quality..

What utility do you suggest to do this?
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There are two actions that you are considering here.

The first is loading to the internet, the second is distributing CDs.

There are many applications that allow you to rip and convert audio files. I use CDex. I've had it such a long time I can't even remember where it came from. Maybe bundled with something.

To load stuff to the internet you need to convert a WAV file to someting smaller, say an MP3. An MP3 is about a tenth of the size of a WAV file. There is quality loss here through this amount of compaction. Note that when you do this conversion, you don't lose your original file. You just get a converted copy.

To distribute CDs to venues, you can burn a whole heap at home. Or you can find someone to do it for you. There are businesses that specifically do CD duplication.
 
I see no reason why the mastering studio couldnt give me both the raw wav data files and a red book CD... doesnt seem a lot to ask! Data discs are very cheap, less then a few dollars...

This would save me any possible logistical problems associated with ripping files with various freeware utilities and my old crappy hard drive..
 
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TheloniusMonk said:
I see no reason why the mastering studio couldnt give me both the raw wav data files and a red book CD...
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I don't see much reason why they couldn't or wouldn't if you specifically asked for it.

But frankly, there's not much need, other than to save you a few keystokes.

A "redbook CD" contains CDA files. The data within CDA files is identical to the data in WAV files; there's only a change in the file wrapper info, which itself has no effect on the music data. When you rip from a CDA file to a WAV file, the data says the same, and will be identical to the separate WAV file that they'd be delivering to you on a separate data disc.

In fact, it might even be better than the separate disc, because you're eliminating the possibility of differences in bit errors between the data disc and the audio disc.

G.

P.S. My mother was one of the nurses taking care of Theloneous Monk for a short while sometime back in the 70s when his health was failing.
 
SouthSIDE Glen said:
In fact, it might even be better than the separate disc, because you're eliminating the possibility of differences in bit errors between the data disc and the audio disc.

G.

P.S. My mother was one of the nurses taking care of Theloneous Monk for a short while sometime back in the 70s when his health was failing.
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Well my only concern is my computer kind of sucks and my drive is old, so i was thinking errors could possibly occur during the ripping process...

AMAZING that your mother was a nurse for Monk! That guy was one of the greatest jazz pianists of all time, I have a poster of him on my wall!!!
 
TheloniusMonk said:
Well my only concern is my computer kind of sucks and my drive is old, so i was thinking errors could possibly occur during the ripping process...
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I don't believe that should be an issue, because the data transfer and HD writing process does have checksum-style error correction built-in, I believe. Look at it this way, have you *ever* had a Word document or spreadsheet or anything like that that was not saved perfectly with every letter and number exactly as you saved it? This does not count when your hard drive actualy goes bad or looses sectors, of course. But when written without error, the write will be accurate.

With CDs and especially CD-Rs it's a bit different because they are actually "etching" the media, and once written, there's no going back to correct the error.
TheloniusMonk said:
AMAZING that your mother was a nurse for Monk! That guy was one of the greatest jazz pianists of all time, I have a poster of him on my wall!!!
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Unfortunately she didn't tell me about it until several years after the fact. Back in the early or mid 70s (I don't remember the exact time, because I didn't know at the time) I was just a young teen w/o even a driver's license yet who had not developed enough of a musical palate to care about bebop, so it never came up. I guess she never thought much about it either; her tastes never got beyond Herb Alpert or The Kingston Trio, and while she knew that Monk was a jazz musician, she never really even knew just how famous he was.

Then years later, when I started trying to educate her that there was musical life beyond "Tom Dooley", Monk somehow came up in conversation along the way, and that's when the bells rang in her head and she started telling the story. I felt like slapping her (well, not really, but you know what I mean) when I found out I could have had the chance to meet him in person. I guess he was pretty darn sick by then, bedridden and all that, but still, it'd have been a much better story if I could have said I met him myself as well.:o

G.
 
So after you get your CD back from the ME (WAV files or Redbook-compliant disc), where do you get ISRC numbers? How do you get those? Do you need those?
 
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