Preparing material for a multi-track CD

[musicman691]

As is mentioned in another thread here using DP's built-in cd burning tool is not the best thing in the world to use/do. I get that much. What I'm asking about is on page 890 of the manual where there's a section that's titled 'Preparing material for a multi-track CD'. I understand most of the process but have trouble with step 3. It says to 'Select all your master stereo mix audio files and drag them together into the new project sequence while holding the Control/Win key. Doing so places them end to end with no gaps'. My problem is where am I supposed to drag them from? If I try and drag them from a Finder folder holding down the Control key I can't drag anything. A box comes up with a bunch of options but nothing that pertains to what I'm trying to do. If I hold down other keys like CMD, Shift, etc. and drag some files get duplicated in the Soundbites window and not everything seems to show up in the Sequence editor.

What am I doing wrong? Or is this one of those functions that doesn't really work? The reason I'm even doing this is to see if I can do most of my CD prep work in DP and not in a CD burn program like DSP Quattro. I've been working with that program's demo and it's quite nice for me but there are a few metering tools I use that won't work in DSP-Q.

[mikehalloran]

I'm not going to venture the first part but I'm curious about this one:

there are a few metering tools I use that won't work in DSP-Q.

Which ones?

[James Steele]

As I recall DSP Quattro supports both AU and VST?

[musicman691]

I'm not going to venture the first part but I'm curious about this one:

there are a few metering tools I use that won't work in DSP-Q.

Which ones?

Blue Cat Audio metering and spectrum plugins which are fully 64 bit

[musicman691]

As I recall DSP Quattro supports both AU and VST?

Yes it does.

[philbrown]

As is mentioned in another thread here using DP's built-in cd burning tool is not the best thing in the world to use/do. I get that much. What I'm asking about is on page 890 of the manual where there's a section that's titled 'Preparing material for a multi-track CD'. I understand most of the process but have trouble with step 3. It says to 'Select all your master stereo mix audio files and drag them together into the new project sequence while holding the Control/Win key. Doing so places them end to end with no gaps'. My problem is where am I supposed to drag them from? If I try and drag them from a Finder folder holding down the Control key I can't drag anything. A box comes up with a bunch of options but nothing that pertains to what I'm trying to do. If I hold down other keys like CMD, Shift, etc. and drag some files get duplicated in the Soundbites window and not everything seems to show up in the Sequence editor.

What am I doing wrong? Or is this one of those functions that doesn't really work? The reason I'm even doing this is to see if I can do most of my CD prep work in DP and not in a CD burn program like DSP Quattro. I've been working with that program's demo and it's quite nice for me but there are a few metering tools I use that won't work in DSP-Q.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but the CD burning function is unreliable and/or broken in DP AFAIK. So with that premise, and given the above, I would bring your mixes into a new DP file and do all your audio mastering/leveling etc there and bounce your audio-mastered files into a new folder. Then bring those files into DSP Quattro to create ('master') the actual CD and place track markers, set gaps, song order, export DDP for replication, create WAV's or mp3's, etc. DSP-Q has all the right tools for the actual CD mastering but if you leave the audio heavy lifting to DP you'll have the 64 bit plugs you want to use.

I master a LOT of CD's (around 60-70 a year) and DSP-Q has been a godsend for that, but I use DP for the audio mastering duties. Just one guy's method, though. There are many different possible workflows to get to the same or similar results.

[musicman691]

As is mentioned in another thread here using DP's built-in cd burning tool is not the best thing in the world to use/do. I get that much. What I'm asking about is on page 890 of the manual where there's a section that's titled 'Preparing material for a multi-track CD'. I understand most of the process but have trouble with step 3. It says to 'Select all your master stereo mix audio files and drag them together into the new project sequence while holding the Control/Win key. Doing so places them end to end with no gaps'. My problem is where am I supposed to drag them from? If I try and drag them from a Finder folder holding down the Control key I can't drag anything. A box comes up with a bunch of options but nothing that pertains to what I'm trying to do. If I hold down other keys like CMD, Shift, etc. and drag some files get duplicated in the Soundbites window and not everything seems to show up in the Sequence editor.

What am I doing wrong? Or is this one of those functions that doesn't really work? The reason I'm even doing this is to see if I can do most of my CD prep work in DP and not in a CD burn program like DSP Quattro. I've been working with that program's demo and it's quite nice for me but there are a few metering tools I use that won't work in DSP-Q.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but the CD burning function is unreliable and/or broken in DP AFAIK. So with that premise, and given the above, I would bring your mixes into a new DP file and do all your audio mastering/leveling etc there and bounce your audio-mastered files into a new folder. Then bring those files into DSP Quattro to create ('master') the actual CD and place track markers, set gaps, song order, export DDP for replication, create WAV's or mp3's, etc. DSP-Q has all the right tools for the actual CD mastering but if you leave the audio heavy lifting to DP you'll have the 64 bit plugs you want to use.

I master a LOT of CD's (around 60-70 a year) and DSP-Q has been a godsend for that, but I use DP for the audio mastering duties. Just one guy's method, though. There are many different possible workflows to get to the same or similar results.

You are missing what I'm trying to do. I'm NOT trying to burn cd's in DP because as I mentioned I know from reading here in another thread that that function isn't working right. What I'm trying to do is to follow what the manual says about bringing all the files I want into a single DP project so I can try and do all the 'heavy lifting' in DP. But I can't seem to get things to work according to what the manual says and want to know what, if anything, I'm doing wrong.

[philbrown]

Try selecting your files, click and hold, THEN hold down the control key (just a guess). Personally that method doesn't make much sense to me unless you don't care about the order that the songs are in. You can also drag all the files into the Soundbites window then control-drag each song into a track in the order you want. I think MOTU calls that "Soundbite Throwing" or some such- the Control key modifier causes each new SB you drag to start where the previous one ends with no gap. The way I work, laying tracks end to end in one DP track doesn't make a lot of sense, since each song will need different treatment, so I use separate tracks for each song but YMMV for whatever reason. If you do a normal select and drag from the finder into the LEFT SIDE of the Tracks Overview, DP will create separate tracks and name them according to the file names. That's how I do it.

[musicman691]

Try selecting your files, click and hold, THEN hold down the control key (just a guess). Personally that method doesn't make much sense to me unless you don't care about the order that the songs are in. You can also drag all the files into the Soundbites window then control-drag each song into a track in the order you want. I think MOTU calls that "Soundbite Throwing" or some such- the Control key modifier causes each new SB you drag to start where the previous one ends with no gap. The way I work, laying tracks end to end in one DP track doesn't make a lot of sense, since each song will need different treatment, so I use separate tracks for each song but YMMV for whatever reason. If you do a normal select and drag from the finder into the LEFT SIDE of the Tracks Overview, DP will create separate tracks and name them according to the file names. That's how I do it.

What you say in your first sentence is what I'm trying to do and it doesn't work (at least that's what I think I'm doing). But again where am I supposed to be dragging from? A Finder window or what? The manual doesn't say and that might be the problem I'm having - not dragging from the right place. I was just trying this to see if I could get away from separate tracks and getting them lined up in the order of play so I could play everything through to get the balance I want.

[philbrown]

You can also drag all the files into the Soundbites window then control-drag each song into a track in the order you want. I think MOTU calls that "Soundbite Throwing" or some such- the Control key modifier causes each new SB you drag to start where the previous one ends with no gap.

This takes all of 1-2 minutes.

[James Steele]

I'm not going to venture the first part but I'm curious about this one:

there are a few metering tools I use that won't work in DSP-Q.

Which ones?

Blue Cat Audio metering and spectrum plugins which are fully 64 bit

That's what I don't understand. See my screen capture below. Blue Cat Meters running in DSP Quattro.

EDIT: I just set this up in a hurry, so I probably should have put the meters plug on the effects for the L&R Main Bus instead. But it seems to work.

[musicman691]

Blue Cat Audio metering and spectrum plugins which are fully 64 bit

That's what I don't understand. See my screen capture below. Blue Cat Meters running in DSP Quattro.

EDIT: I just set this up in a hurry, so I probably should have put the meters plug on the effects for the L&R Main Bus instead. But it seems to work.


James:
I was trying to use them on the L&R Main Bus and neither the au or vst versions would show in the fx slot when selected. What did show were the words 'unknown plugin'. But no Blue Cat metering plugin.

My apologies for the messed-up formatting as I tried to trim down the multiple quote layers to fit the forum rules and I botched it.

[James Steele]

I loaded this plug in the L&R Main Bus as well after I posted this.

New Screen Shot. Using Black Cat DP Meter Pro v. 4.05 and DSP Quattro v. 4.24 build 789.

[musicman691]

I loaded this plug in the L&R Main Bus as well after I posted this.

New Screen Shot. Using Black Cat DP Meter Pro v. 4.05 and DSP Quattro v. 4.24 build 789.

I tried it just now and it's working. I have the DSP-Q demo 4.2.4 build 789 and was trying to use DP Meter Pro v 4.05. I re-created what I had up yesterday when I was trying this - 11 tracks of .wav audio with a mix of 16 and 24 bit 44.1 KHz files. With the demo one can't save anything so I re-created that today and lo and behold it is working perfectly using the au format plugin for the BCA plugin. Like I said when I first tried it I tried both the au and vst format plugin and even though I could select the Blue Cat plugin from the menu it wouldn't show on screen and now it does. And it wouldn't show in the fx slot either. And yes I tried the little 'edit' button.

The main difference between yesterday and today is this is the first thing I tried on my daw machine (family time on a Sunday you know) and yesterday I had done some work in PT11.3.1 and DP8.07 before trying to work in DSP-Q. I wonder if that had anything to do with it? I'm using au format plugins in DP and aax in PT.

Thanks for sticking with me on this and at least I know the DSP-Q works and it's just a matter of figuring out what happened and how to fix it. One possibility: when I first started DSP-Q and it went through it's plugin scan when it came to a couple of the BCA metering plugins it asked for my authorization of the plugins saying they weren't authorized and I know they are - could this be it? What bothers me is it said in the slot below where the plugin name should show 'unrecognized plugin' or something like that.