Recommended Audio CD Authoring application
Reply #5 – 2007-01-02 16:12:52
Heres the deal: Although audio cd's are fairly rare for me nowadays, they do come up on occasion. Up to this point I have either went the route of 'convert compressed audio to PCM WAV in adobe audition, then burn in nero as a cd audio project' or 'burn straight in winamp and let it do the conversion process on its own'. Why? You go from CD to Lossless and/or LAME mp3 in one step using EAC with or without REACT and OmniEncoder. Going to a wav intermediate is a waste of time. I just make sure to keep lame_enc up to date to the latest alpha build on rarewares and I keep my settings at 96-320 VBR, VHQ, 0q, stereo. Using the latest alpha for day to listening is not advised - by the developers or anyone else. The alpha's are designed to address specific issues and often poorer overall quality than the official releases. Alpha's are for testing, nothing more. You will get better sounding files if you stick to the latest official releases. You can also do better with the settings. Take a look at the wiki, then try V2, V1 or V0 with q0. They will put you in the target rate range. Drop the stereo. Like I had mentioned above, I have only used those two options for authoring audio cd's. I am just curious if anyone else here had any recommendations for doing this while keeping quality in mind. Or is the fact that it's going to a decompressed format makes the program choice nil? Not sure what you mean by "authoring". For me, authoring is starting from a source live or studio recording, mixing and mastering, then burning the resulting 16/44 PCM files to a Red Book standard audio CD. I use Audition with various plug-ins for most of this work. To get compressed formats (FLAC, mp3) from these mastered mix downs, I use EAC or another program to compress the files, but I do not re-rip them from the CD, I just use the final files directly. Are we talking about the same thing here or is "authoring" something different for you?