CD duplication: not always as easy as it looks.
“I would like to burn a limited amount of CD’s of my original tunes for friends. I have recorded my DAT stereo files to Pro Tools, done all editing and bounced to disk. I then open MasterList CD and burn a disk. Everything works great. I then clear my hard drive for other projects. My question involves backup and duplication of these original tunes/audio files. The next time I want to burn a copy of my original tunes, what is the fastest way to duplicate a disk? I can’t copy a disk using MasterList CD, so I’ve been using Toast. When I use Toast some of the info on the CD gets messed up. For instance Toast always puts 2 seconds of silence between tunes, and some of my songs have cross fades in MLCD. What is the fastest way to copy my original music for limited CD runs? Thanks for the inSync email! It’s been a great source for all kinds of audio knowledge.”
Notice how they butter me up with the compliments? You’re supposed to do that BEFORE you ask the question. Just kidding. We really do get lots of very kind correspondence from inSync readers and we DO appreciate it.
There is a way to override the 2 second silence gap in Toast (as well as some other programs), but our experience has been that Toast, while workable, doesn’t make a truly “exact” copy of your audio CD. Sometimes things like crossfades between tracks and other things can have glitches. This depends to some extent on the burner used as well as the CD player playing the newly created disc. Some users say they get acceptable results this way, others do not.
There are two immediate solutions to your problem. One is to get a dedicated CD duplicator. Microboards makes a lot of really good ones (there are other good brands too). These things are great. Put in a CD and your blank CDR, press a button, and 10 minutes later voila! You have a duplicate disc. They work the same regardless of whether it is CD ROM data or an audio CD.
If you can’t justify the expense of one of these systems a good workaround is to simply archive your MasterList session (including audio files) with Toast. You burn up an extra CDR, but that’s no big deal. The next time you need to make more copies of that disc you can drag the data back on to your hard drive and open it again in MasterList. You can either save it as a MasterList disc image (a.k.a. image file), which will make things very fast and easy to make more, or you can save the session itself, which would give you the option to make changes at a later date.
A possible third option is to find some software that will allow you to insert your audio disc into your CD ROM drive and reliably burn an exact duplicate to your CDR drive. I do not know of a program that really does this as a simple one-button copy operation without changing the data in some way (Remember, the output of MLCD is Red Book). If anyone does, let us know. Given how sensitive the RIAA would be to something like this I don’t expect to see it as a feature in any consumer software.