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Sony Audio Studio - splitting a long file into separate tracks ?


davd_indigo

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I have a cd I made (of myself). I need to split it into separate tracks and burn 3 copies. I tried Track-At-Once with "separate regions for each track" or something like that thinking it might burn separate tracks - but no go. I can't find anything in the help file ( unless I don't know the proper vocabulary ). A google search gave me a help page for Sony Sound Forge. I figured it might help. But the first FAQ says something about Event Edit mode. I don't seem to have this. Unless I do (unknown knowns and all that). The FAQs below:

 

If you have recorded a live concert as one files how do you create separate tracks for each song on your CD?

 

There are a few different ways you could do this. Here's one: Switch to event edit mode, place your cursor at a point where you want one CD track to end and the next to begin, press S on your keyboard to split the event into two, click the first of the two events to select it, and finally press N on your keyboard to create a CD track that matches the length of the selected event.

 

Can we burn a mixed CD with different tracks without listening to the gaps in between mixes for us DJs? Gaps are the main concern in between tracks.

 

Yes, you have precise control over the amount of space that exists between CD tracks and audio

 

 

 

David

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Here's how it's done in Sound Forge, and I believe the same procedure, perhaps with slightly different terminology in the menus, is common to Audio Studio. You may need to do a little translation.

 

First, don't be lazy. Choose the starting point of each track yourself and don't let the program decide where the divisions should be. Place a marker (the M key) at the beginning of the first track and one at each place where you want each successive track to start. Remember that it takes about a quarter of a second on the average for a CD to start playing, so leave a little space between the marker and the first note of the song if you want the listener (or a DJ) to be able to cue up the song and have it play without cutting off the first note or two Put a marker at the end of the last song as well.

 

The next step is to convert each section between a pair of markers into a separate region. Open the Edit menu, select Regions List, and click Markers to Regions. Save the new "split" file. When you open the Save window, before saviing, make sure the "Save Metadat With File" box is checked. I'd suggest saving it with another name from your original project so you'll still have the "raw" recording intact. I just tack "regions" on to the original file name when I save this intermediate step.

 

Open the Edit menu, select Track List, then Create CD Tracks from Regions. You can save this version of the file, too (I add "CDTracks" to the original file name).

 

Open the Tools menu. Click Burn Disk At Once CD. That'll do it.

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Any sound editor can do it, even some free ones. The first thing you may want to do is pull the songs off the CD and onto your computer. If they were put on the CD as separate tracks, then they should come off as separate wave files. You can download a free program like CDex which will do this in seconds. http://cdexos.sourceforge.net/?q=download

 

This program will download as Wave files or MP3's. Make sure its Wave files for maximum fidelity.

 

Once you've done that you can just burn disks from the wave files. Key item is space. If the reason you cant burn them all to a disk its because you don't have enough space, then be sure you're using a disk that's large enough. (800M vs 700M) The other reason is you may be adding space between tracks with the CD burner or you need to trim the intro and outro lengths down a bit to fit them all on a similar disk.

 

To do that any editor program should allow the songs to be trimmed.

 

If for some reason the songs were put on the disk as a single file, the CDex program will pull it off as a single wave file. You would then want to break it down into separate files editing. Some editors have markers to split tracks, and with others you just highlight everything that you don't want and delete it. If you highlighted everything but the first track and deleted it, you'd be left with only the first track. Then save the first track by the song title, undo the delete, and highlight everything but the second track and delete it. This breaks out the tracks manually and you can add any kind of fade ins and outs needed with an envelope tool.

 

Once you have all separate tracks on the drive then you can just burn them to a new CD just like any other sets of songs.

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I followed your advice Mike, and created markers between each track even though they'd already been

separated into regions (wonder if I need to delete those).

 

Then, as for the next step, I open Edit/RegionsList and get the options

/Insert/ClearAll/Open/SaveAs/CopyOntoClipboard....no /MarkersToRegions

Actually I'd be happy to delete my markers if I could write "RegionsToADisc".

 

But I just checked the Edit menu. There's nothing resembling CreateCDTracksFromRegions.

I have "BurnTrackAtOnceAudioCD" and "BurnDiscDiscAtOnceAudioCD" under Tools. I tried

DiscAtOnce last night with the automatically created regions. It just burned one long file onto the CD.

Might it work differently with the markers ?

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Well. I burned one CD successfully with separate tracks. Burned 2 more that were one long file. Used /Tools/BurnTrackAtOnce. I'm confused.

And I'm out of burnable CD's. Ordered 100 Verbatim from amazon. Will have to do some more experimenting. A good way to learn but

sometimes frustrating.

 

David

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I guess Audio Studio isn't that close to Sound Forge Pro, at least in menu terminology.

 

Track-At-Once means that each region gets written to the CD with a default spacing, usually 2 seconds between tracks. The disadvantage of using Track-At-Once is twofold. One is that you always get a space between the tracks and you may not have an option to set what it is. That's not so bad if it's an ordinary song-after-song CD, but if it's a live concert, you don't want a gap between every song in the performance. The other thing is that the laser in the CD drive turns off after each track, and then has to turn on again before the next track. This may not be a problem with modern drives, but it used to frequently cause problems.

 

Disk-at-once means that the tracks are defined as you want them (if you want spaces of silence between tracks, you need to insert those in the large file) and then the the whole file is burned at once with the defined track boundaries recorded so that they show up properly in the track number display in a player.

 

I really don't know what more to suggest since I don't know your program. Review the section of the manual or help file if that's what you have to work from, and see if you can find the way to use the procedure that i described.

 

Sony used to have a stand-alone program called CD Architect, that was integrated with Sound Forge to the extent that you could call it up from within Sound Forge, or run it stand-alone on a file that you've saved on your disk. In Sound Forge 9 or maybe 10, they included the functions of CD Architect right in the main program. I assumed that the "light" Audio Studio version, since it includes CD burning, worked the same way. Maybe so, with different terminology.

 

Looking at the Quick Start Guide [ ]http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/...ink?id=4498.1 ] under Burining Disk-At-Once, it looks like it describes the process pretty much as I did, except for the part about markers and converting markers to regions. It appears that you need to select the area that you want to be a track, then convert it to a region by selecting Region from the Insert Menu or using the keyboard shortcut Ctrl-R. Since the next step after defining all the regions where you want the track boundaries is to burn the CD (Burn Disk At Once from the Tools menu), perhaps that operation automatically creates tracks from regions without going through that step manually.

 

Keep trying. I think I had a few failures before I got the hang of it,

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Well I seem to have stumbled in to success here. A google search gave me the help file below.

 

http://dspcdn.sonycreativesoftware.com/manuals/audiostudio10.0.252_qsg_enu.pdf

 

I dragged the 1st CD audio file, highlighted all the audio data in the window, and (from the menu) did Insert/Region. Then I did this with the second file, then copied and pasted it into the 1st window. Then did this 8 more times (for a total of 10 tracks). Then did Disc-At-Once.

It worked. 10 separate tracks.

 

I still think Sony could somehow make this clearer in their instructions.

 

WRGKMC, I downloaded the CDex program. I dragged 10 audio Wav files into it. But found nowhere in the menu a "Burn" command. Clicking on the "Help" gave absolutely nothing. I'm sure I'm missing something here again as I was in the Sony.

 

I thank both of you for your thoughtful responses.

 

David

 

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Well I seem to have stumbled in to success here. A google search gave me the help file

 

I dragged the 1st CD audio file, highlighted all the audio data in the window, and (from the menu) did Insert/Region. Then I did this with the second file, then copied and pasted it into the 1st window. Then did this 8 more times (for a total of 10 tracks). Then did Disc-At-Once.

It worked. 10 separate tracks.

 

I still think Sony could somehow make this clearer in their instructions.

 

Sony's documentation is awful for all of their audio software. Glad you got it working. That file is the same one I was looking at when I gave you the instructions the last time around.

 

Your initial post suggested to me that you had a recording of a live show (perhaps with some editing) and you wanted to make a CD of that, with all the ambience and chat in between songs. That's why I mentioned using markers to indicate where you wanted the track display on the CD player to advance, or to be cue points when playing just one song. If you've already divided the concert recording into individual files for each song, then you already have the region boundaries defined for when you string them together in the order you want the whole CD to play.

 

I downloaded the CDex program. I dragged 10 audio Wav files into it. But found nowhere in the menu a "Burn" command.

 

I believe that He With The Unpronouncable Name was thinking that you were going in the other direction. It's CD Extractor, designed to convert CD tracks to WAV files.

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My recordings are live in the studio. The studio being my living room. The recordings are mostly demos I made for guys in an attempt at a (failed) band. But I put together some of the demos on a CD for a few friends and family. I also just got a Tascam DP-008EX and am having a ball playing around with multitrack experiments (did a recording of "Money" the R&B song and "Blue Light Boogie" by Louis Jordan with vocal harmonies).

 

Anyway, you mentioned CDex converting CD tracks to WAV files. I thought they were WAV files. Are they called something else ? I know I'm very audio-ignorant.

 

 

Dave

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Well I seem to have stumbled in to success here. A google search gave me the help file below.

 

http://dspcdn.sonycreativesoftware.com/manuals/audiostudio10.0.252_qsg_enu.pdf

 

I dragged the 1st CD audio file, highlighted all the audio data in the window, and (from the menu) did Insert/Region. Then I did this with the second file, then copied and pasted it into the 1st window. Then did this 8 more times (for a total of 10 tracks). Then did Disc-At-Once.

It worked. 10 separate tracks.

 

I still think Sony could somehow make this clearer in their instructions.

 

WRGKMC, I downloaded the CDex program. I dragged 10 audio Wav files into it. But found nowhere in the menu a "Burn" command. Clicking on the "Help" gave absolutely nothing. I'm sure I'm missing something here again as I was in the Sony.

 

I thank both of you for your thoughtful responses.

 

David

 

 

 

That program will just take the files off the CD as separate wave files. It doesn't burn disks.

You would then need to use a separate disk burner program to burn a disk after you have the files on the computer as wave files. http://download.cnet.com/windows/cd-burners/3150-2646_4-0.html

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When you are using the Vinyl and Restoration Tool, you will see a 'Help' button near the lower, right corner (Sound Forge v9).  A pop-up help window will come up.  Not far down is a nicely, detailed description of how to do exactly what you are trying to do. 

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