Andy Nilssen wrote:
>>I'm a new user of CD Architect (& digital domain recording) & am having a blast so far.
>>
>>One area that seems not well covered is volume & saturation, especially coming from the analog
>>world. I'm making personal CD compilations, and the volume of individual tracks from
>>different source CDs varies greatly. So far the only way I see to compensate for track volume
>>differences is 1) boost the volume of the wav file in Sound Forge or 2) boost the track in CD
>>Arch using the 'envelope' tool. 1) is a pain; 2) is OK but doesn't change the graphical
>>representation of the peaks, so the only way to know how you're doing is by monitoring the
>>audio.
>>


>>I sure miss a good old set of VU meters or an updated peak chart to see what's really going on
>>- how do I know I've achieved making the tracks about the same level & I haven't over
>>saturated ??
>>
>>My answer is to "guess" using 2) above and audio monitoring tracks; then I'll write out a full
>>disk image file & look at it. If anything is grossly off, I'll tweak the project & write a new image.
>>
>>Some sort of tool to compensate individual track volume over a CD would be nice ...
>>
>>Finally, how do I know where to set the master volume faders again w/o oversaturating the
>>final CD??
>>
>>Thanks. Very nice product.
>>
>>AndyN
>>
One thing about digital domain is that unlike a nice analogue tape like basf 911, which as I recall had about 30dB of headroom before sounding yukky [technical term], is that there is a very finite limit to the amount of energy you can put on a cd. Hence fast acting dBfs scales. The best way to get at least a reasonable balance exists in the Soundforge program, which is the normalise function, under the processing menu. You can use peak or rms [roughly equivalent to vu]. The other great thing is you can use the scan peaks button to check your levels before you process. Bear in mind that you can only go to 0dBfs, so often the best way to set your levels is to use the peak function. at least then you know that you have the maximum level possible on the cd when you burn. If you have the full Soundforge program, you can set up a batch processing script to take the tedium out of doing this.

Incidentally, as an aside, mastering houses for cd's, such as Masterdisk, have hyper accurate metering, on a dBfs scale, which they will use to peak to .01dB headroom...

hope this is of use

Tim