| Home |
| Search |
| Today's Posts |
|
#1
|
|||
|
|||
NTI CD-Maker puts goddamn CLICKS between audio tracks?
I'm in the process of making digital recordings of all my old analog
albums, using an old SB Live card in an even older PC. The recording process works fine, as long as I allow several dB of headroom above the highest peaks -- the SBLive has a rather soft analog clip a bit below the digital limit. The problem comes when I attempt to burn the audio from my hard drive onto a CD. This is done on a more up-to-date machine, which is running Windows 2000 (I just couldn't stomach XP) and has NTI CD-Maker "2000 Plus" v5.1.17, some version of which comes with most burners. I divide the giant WAV recording into tracks, and then slap those tracks into CD-Maker and burn the disc... and when I play it back, there's this huge CLICK every time it crosses a track change! Is this something other people have run into, or is it my own special good fortune? Is this a known shortcoming of NTI CD-Maker 5? Has anyone solved this problem by changing software or hardware or something, or is this something I just have to deal with by guesswork? And if NTI is the problem, as I suppose is probably the case, what do people recommend as a simple and affordable replacement for it? Thanks for any help you can give. |
|
#2
|
|||
|
|||
|
This is sometimes a problem when burning in Track-at-Once mode instead of
Disc-at-Once mode, which you should normally do anyway. NTI has tech support, maybe talk to them if you can't figure how to do this, but it should be there in the Options somewhere. The clicks are probably caused by a DC offset, however slight, at the beginning of the tracks. Some editing software can probably fix this. My old DC Art program did. If not DC then the "click" can be edited out just like any other click or pop. Mark Z. wrote in message ups.com... I'm in the process of making digital recordings of all my old analog albums, using an old SB Live card in an even older PC. The recording process works fine, as long as I allow several dB of headroom above the highest peaks -- the SBLive has a rather soft analog clip a bit below the digital limit. The problem comes when I attempt to burn the audio from my hard drive onto a CD. This is done on a more up-to-date machine, which is running Windows 2000 (I just couldn't stomach XP) and has NTI CD-Maker "2000 Plus" v5.1.17, some version of which comes with most burners. I divide the giant WAV recording into tracks, and then slap those tracks into CD-Maker and burn the disc... and when I play it back, there's this huge CLICK every time it crosses a track change! Is this something other people have run into, or is it my own special good fortune? Is this a known shortcoming of NTI CD-Maker 5? Has anyone solved this problem by changing software or hardware or something, or is this something I just have to deal with by guesswork? And if NTI is the problem, as I suppose is probably the case, what do people recommend as a simple and affordable replacement for it? Thanks for any help you can give. |
|
#4
|
|||
|
|||
|
paul wrote ...
I'm in the process of making digital recordings of all my old analog albums, using an old SB Live card in an even older PC. The recording process works fine, as long as I allow several dB of headroom above the highest peaks -- the SBLive has a rather soft analog clip a bit below the digital limit. My condolonces. The limiting is really harsh. I threw out the lousy thing and went and bought a $14 generic sound card that sounds 300% better. The problem comes when I attempt to burn the audio from my hard drive onto a CD. This is done on a more up-to- date machine, which is running Windows 2000 (I just couldn't stomach XP) and has NTI CD-Maker "2000 Plus" v5.1.17, some version of which comes with most burners. I divide the giant WAV recording into tracks, and then slap those tracks into CD-Maker and burn the disc... and when I play it back, there's this huge CLICK every time it crosses a track change! I have found that if you don't "fade-in" at the beginning of the track and "fade-out" at the end, you will hear the step function as the CD player un-mutes from zero to whatever DC offset is in your audio data. |
|
#5
|
|||
|
|||
|
"Richard Crowley" wrote in message
The problem comes when I attempt to burn the audio from my hard drive onto a CD. This is done on a more up-to- date machine, which is running Windows 2000 (I just couldn't stomach XP) and has NTI CD-Maker "2000 Plus" v5.1.17, some version of which comes with most burners. I divide the giant WAV recording into tracks, and then slap those tracks into CD-Maker and burn the disc... and when I play it back, there's this huge CLICK every time it crosses a track change! I have found that if you don't "fade-in" at the beginning of the track and "fade-out" at the end, you will hear the step function as the CD player un-mutes from zero to whatever DC offset is in your audio data. Agreed - doing proper fade-in and fade-out at the end of every track can save a lot of grief. This is particularly true of vinyl and cassette transcriptions. Often, with a little artful fade-in and fade-out, you can almost make it seem like those old cassettes and LPs really didn't have a lot of background noise. |
|
#6
|
|||
|
|||
|
In article . com,
wrote: I'm in the process of making digital recordings of all my old analog albums, using an old SB Live card in an even older PC. The recording process works fine, as long as I allow several dB of headroom above the highest peaks -- the SBLive has a rather soft analog clip a bit below the digital limit. The problem comes when I attempt to burn the audio from my hard drive onto a CD. This is done on a more up-to-date machine, which is running Windows 2000 (I just couldn't stomach XP) and has NTI CD-Maker "2000 Plus" v5.1.17, some version of which comes with most burners. I divide the giant WAV recording into tracks, and then slap those tracks into CD-Maker and burn the disc... and when I play it back, there's this huge CLICK every time it crosses a track change! Is this something other people have run into, or is it my own special good fortune? It would be worth "ripping" the resulting CD, and taking a look at the digital version of the track transitions. When a CD is burned in "track at once" mode, it is normal for the burner to place a two-second "pregap" between tracks. This pregap is usually filled with "digital silence" - that is, zero samples. The click you are hearing could come from any of several things: [1] If your audio WAV file has a DC offset in it - that is, if the average value is not close to zero - then the transitions from "WAV file silence" to "digital-zero silence" would involve a sudden jump in the level. You'd probably hear a pair of clicks, separated by two seconds. [2] If you are cutting the WAV files into track segments using software which is not "CD aware", you might be putting the cut points at locations which don't correspond to CD frame boundaries (1/75 of a second). This would force CD Maker to either discard a fraction of a frame's worth of data, or pad out the last frame with zeros... and it's even possible that a bug in the software causes it to pad the last frame with garbage or with repeated data (either of which would probably cause noise). I suggest that you might get better results if you use software which allows you to record in "disc at once" mode, and use the burning software to set the inter-track boundaries. This allows the transcribed LP data to be burned as a single digital stream (per side of the album), without the two-second digital-silence pregap placed between tracks. I do this on Linux using the "cdrdao" software (and its GCDMaster graphical user interface front-end) with very good results. -- Dave Platt AE6EO Hosting the Jade Warrior home page: http://www.radagast.org/jade-warrior I do _not_ wish to receive unsolicited commercial email, and I will boycott any company which has the gall to send me such ads! |
|
#7
|
|||
|
|||
|
Dave Platt wrote:
When a CD is burned in "track at once" mode, it is normal for the burner to place a two-second "pregap" between tracks. This pregap is usually filled with "digital silence" - that is, zero samples. The click you are hearing could come from any of several things: [1] If your audio WAV file has a DC offset in it - that is, if the average value is not close to zero - then the transitions from "WAV file silence" to "digital-zero silence" would involve a sudden jump in the level. You'd probably hear a pair of clicks, separated by two seconds. My tracks do have a fade-in and fade-out... I made them just a few milliseconds long so the ear wouldn't notice a hole in the background noise. And I just checked and the software is burning disc-at-once. [2] If you are cutting the WAV files into track segments using software which is not "CD aware", you might be putting the cut points at locations which don't correspond to CD frame boundaries (1/75 of a second). This would force CD Maker to either discard a fraction of a frame's worth of data, or pad out the last frame with zeros... and it's even possible that a bug in the software causes it to pad the last frame with garbage or with repeated data (either of which would probably cause noise). That must be it. So what's the exact size I have to use a multiple of? (google google) 588 samples, right? The software's documentation seems to claim that this should not be a problem... Okay, I'm going to try padding my tracks to multiples of 588. I suggest that you might get better results if you use software which allows you to record in "disc at once" mode, and use the burning software to set the inter-track boundaries. This allows the transcribed LP data to be burned as a single digital stream (per side of the album), without the two-second digital-silence pregap placed between tracks. I do this on Linux using the "cdrdao" software (and its GCDMaster graphical user interface front-end) with very good results. I wonder what there is for Windoze that does this. NTI doesn't have such a feature. Since my files are mostly not divided into tracks, saving that step would help. |
|
#8
|
|||
|
|||
|
(me) wrote:
Okay, I'm going to try padding my tracks to multiples of 588. That didn't help. When I read the track back again, it turned out that the "click" is a bunch of gibberish about 24 samples long about 96 samples from the start of each track, all on the positive side of the zero line. This suggests to me that it's ASCII getting interpreted as sound. I look at the hex of the ripped track and at about the right place I see stuff along the lines of "LIST....INFOICRD....2003-10-26..IENG....Paul Kienitz..ISFT....Sound Forge XP 4.0" with bunches of zeroes on either side. When I look at the original track that was dropped onto the disk, this is the crap that was at the very end of the file. So apparently the metadata from one track spilled over into the next as audio. Meaning that the NTI CD-Maker doesn't know how to clean it out of WAV format files that it reads in. Which is just totally lame. I mean, if one claims to support a given file format, one should at least have SOMEONE in the office glance over the format specs before shipping the product... So now I'll try re-saving all those tracks with all possible metadata excluded. (burn burn) Hey, now it works okay! |
|
#9
|
|||
|
|||
|
In article .com,
wrote: That didn't help. When I read the track back again, it turned out that the "click" is a bunch of gibberish about 24 samples long about 96 samples from the start of each track, all on the positive side of the zero line. This suggests to me that it's ASCII getting interpreted as sound. I look at the hex of the ripped track and at about the right place I see stuff along the lines of "LIST....INFOICRD....2003-10-26..IENG....Paul Kienitz..ISFT....Sound Forge XP 4.0" with bunches of zeroes on either side. When I look at the original track that was dropped onto the disk, this is the crap that was at the very end of the file. So apparently the metadata from one track spilled over into the next as audio. Meaning that the NTI CD-Maker doesn't know how to clean it out of WAV format files that it reads in. Which is just totally lame. I mean, if one claims to support a given file format, one should at least have SOMEONE in the office glance over the format specs before shipping the product... Aha, this is making sense now. WAV is a particular variety of RIFF file... a multi-section tagged file which can contain several different sorts of data. One chunk contains the file format information (number of channels, sample bit depth, sampling rate, sample interpretation, etc.), there can be a commentary block or other miscellaneous blocks, and then there's the block of samples. Some programmers assume that the data sub-chunk is the last one in the file (which is true for the great majority of WAV files), don't bother to look at the chunkSize field in the chunk header, and just burn everything from the start of the waveform data up through the end of the file. Yeah, it's lame, and comes from an inadequate understanding of the RIFF/WAV sorta-standard. I blushingly admit that I made this mistake once myself, around 15 years ago. Complain to the software author and ask for a fix. For it's worth I've heard good things about the burning software from www.goldenhawk.com - the price doesn't look bad and it's said to work well. -- Dave Platt AE6EO Hosting the Jade Warrior home page: http://www.radagast.org/jade-warrior I do _not_ wish to receive unsolicited commercial email, and I will boycott any company which has the gall to send me such ads! |
|
#10
|
|||
|
|||
|
paulkienitz wrote ...
That didn't help. When I read the track back again, it turned out that the "click" is a bunch of gibberish about 24 samples long about 96 samples from the start of each track, all on the positive side of the zero line. This suggests to me that it's ASCII getting interpreted as sound. I look at the hex of the ripped track and at about the right place I see stuff along the lines of "LIST....INFOICRD....2003-10-26..IENG....Paul Kienitz..ISFT....Sound Forge XP 4.0" with bunches of zeroes on either side. When I look at the original track that was dropped onto the disk, this is the crap that was at the very end of the file. So apparently the metadata from one track spilled over into the next as audio. Meaning that the NTI CD-Maker doesn't know how to clean it out of WAV format files that it reads in. Which is just totally lame. I mean, if one claims to support a given file format, one should at least have SOMEONE in the office glance over the format specs before shipping the product... I agree, that is incredibly lame. I'd demand my money back for such a brain-dead product. So now I'll try re-saving all those tracks with all possible metadata excluded. You shouldn't have to work-around such stupidity. Most other audio CD burning apps are smart enough to properly interperet WAV files. I like Cheetah Burner, myself. |
|
#11
|
|||
|
|||
|
|
|
#12
|
|||
|
|||
|
I recently installed a new DVD/CD burner on my PC and it
came with the Nero software. For once in my life, I decided to RTFM first and I ran across this little gem, which might be the solution to your problem... "If possible, audio CDs should always be burned in the 'Disc-at-once' mode. This will make the most out of the features the Nero offers and will avoid unwanted 'hiss and crackle' between individual tracks." Unless they can offer a competent technical explanation of how this happens, it sounds like marketing gibberish. No proper CD player will un-mute unless it has a reliable bitstream of audio data to decode. Extraneous digits at the beginning and end of a "track" will be thrown away as noise before they ever get translated into audio. |
|
#13
|
|||
|
|||
|
"Richard Crowley" wrote in news:10up0tltjtpl635
@corp.supernews.com: I recently installed a new DVD/CD burner on my PC and it came with the Nero software. For once in my life, I decided to RTFM first and I ran across this little gem, which might be the solution to your problem... "If possible, audio CDs should always be burned in the 'Disc-at-once' mode. This will make the most out of the features the Nero offers and will avoid unwanted 'hiss and crackle' between individual tracks." Unless they can offer a competent technical explanation of how this happens, it sounds like marketing gibberish. No proper CD player will un-mute unless it has a reliable bitstream of audio data to decode. Extraneous digits at the beginning and end of a "track" will be thrown away as noise before they ever get translated into audio. No, it doesn't sound like marketing giberish. Earlier in the manual they described the difference between track-at-once and disc-at-once recording. Apparently they (and, presumably, others) turn off the laser between tracks when recording in track-at-once mode; in disc-at-once mode, the laser stays on and gives a clean transition from track to track. In other words, in track-at-once mode, the entity being recorded is the track, not the complete disc. I still think it's a worthwhile experiment for the original poster, assuming that he's still using the NTI software and that NTI supports disc- at-once recording. |
|
#14
|
|||
|
|||
|
Dave Platt wrote: In article .com, wrote: That didn't help. When I read the track back again, it turned out that the "click" is a bunch of gibberish about 24 samples long about 96 samples from the start of each track, all on the positive side of the zero line. This suggests to me that it's ASCII getting interpreted as sound. I look at the hex of the ripped track and at about the right place I see stuff along the lines of "LIST....INFOICRD....2003-10-26..IENG....Paul Kienitz..ISFT....Sound Forge XP 4.0" with bunches of zeroes on either side. When I look at the original track that was dropped onto the disk, this is the crap that was at the very end of the file. So apparently the metadata from one track spilled over into the next as audio. Meaning that the NTI CD-Maker doesn't know how to clean it out of WAV format files that it reads in. Which is just totally lame. I mean, if one claims to support a given file format, one should at least have SOMEONE in the office glance over the format specs before shipping the product... Aha, this is making sense now. Indeed it makes perfect sense. WAV is a particular variety of RIFF file... a multi-section tagged file which can contain several different sorts of data. One chunk contains the file format information (number of channels, sample bit depth, sampling rate, sample interpretation, etc.), there can be a commentary block or other miscellaneous blocks, and then there's the block of samples. Some programmers assume that the data sub-chunk is the last one in the file (which is true for the great majority of WAV files), don't bother to look at the chunkSize field in the chunk header, and just burn everything from the start of the waveform data up through the end of the file. This is the whole issue that has been discussed at length in the various standards organizations (e.g., AESSC, of which I am a member and was heavily involved when AES-46 was being reviewed) and comes under the heading of "end chunk problems". An "end chunk" is one which follows the data chunk in a RIFF file. It is known that there are a number of programs that do not properly deal with end chunks, i.e., they assume the data chunk is the final one in the file and just blindly go reading to the end of the file. Doing it right is actually EASY, so this piece of software is TRYLU lame. But, by the same token, the industry AS A WHOLE knows that such programs exist so a convention has developed to NOT put chunks after the data chunk just so they don't kick this particular skunk. In other words, Sound Forge SHOULD know better: it should know how to properly construct a wave file so that it is compatible with the widest range of potential applications, and not writing end chunks is one way of doing that (they're writing an INFO chunk, which is fairly quickly becoming obsolete in professional applications anyway because of its complete lack of standardization). So, yes, NTI CD-maker is a piece of **** for doing what they're doing, but so is Sound Forge for doing what they're doing as well. |
|
#15
|
|||
|
|||
|
"Jim" wrote ...
No, it doesn't sound like marketing giberish. Earlier in the manual they described the difference between track-at-once and disc-at-once recording. Apparently they (and, presumably, others) turn off the laser between tracks when recording in track-at-once mode; in disc-at-once mode, the laser stays on and gives a clean transition from track to track. In other words, in track-at-once mode, the entity being recorded is the track, not the complete disc. Hate to break it to you, but virtually all CDR hardware and software uses both track-at-once and disc-at-once modes. If you can't cite any information beyond the original gibberish, suggest learning how CD players work might be instructional. |
|
#16
|
|||
|
|||
|
"Richard Crowley" wrote in
: "Jim" wrote ... No, it doesn't sound like marketing giberish. Earlier in the manual they described the difference between track-at-once and disc-at-once recording. Apparently they (and, presumably, others) turn off the laser between tracks when recording in track-at-once mode; in disc-at-once mode, the laser stays on and gives a clean transition from track to track. In other words, in track-at-once mode, the entity being recorded is the track, not the complete disc. Hate to break it to you, but virtually all CDR hardware and software uses both track-at-once and disc-at-once modes. If you can't cite any information beyond the original gibberish, suggest learning how CD players work might be instructional. Not being so quick to pull the trigger on gratuitous putdowns in your posts could be helpful, too. I simply quoted material in Nero's user manual where they recommended using disc-at-once mode instead of track-at-once for recording audio CDs. Granted, the manual is dumbed down, but I've got to assume that they have valid reasons for making that recommendation. I can't see how their recommendation could be interpreted as marketing-related. -- JS |
|
#17
|
|||
|
|||
|
"Jimbo" wrote ...
I simply quoted material in Nero's user manual where they recommended using disc-at-once mode instead of track-at-once for recording audio CDs. Granted, the manual is dumbed down, but I've got to assume that they have valid reasons for making that recommendation. I can't see how their recommendation could be interpreted as marketing-related. Good luck. |
| Reply |
| Thread Tools | |
| Display Modes | |
|
|
Similar Threads
|
||||
| Thread | Forum | |||
| OT Political | Pro Audio | |||
Linear Mode
