Last week’s Tech Tip on basic mastering (see inSync 5/11/00) sparked a few interesting questions. One of them was similar to a question I see a lot regarding Digidesign systems. It basically goes like this: if you’ve assembled a long pair of tracks representing all the songs that need to get burned to a CD how do you identify each song in such a way that you can burn the CD with proper track ID’s and such?
There are a few recording/editing platforms that let you do everything in one place. Digidesign does not, but the solution can be pretty simple. In your Pro Tools software all you need to do is mark each “song” as a unique region. Even if they are all part of one huge sound file you can still do this. Use Digidesign’s MasterList CD software (which happens to be an excellent Red Book CD burning program) to import the files. It will recognize Pro Tools regions and allow you to create unique track ID’s from each of them as if they are separate sound files. The procedure for this is very simple and explained well in the MLCD manual.
If you don’t have MLCD, but use Toast or some other program you will have to take each of those regions you created and save them as a separate sound file. You can actually do this without much difficulty under the regions menu over on the right hand side of the edit window. Those individual files can obviously be read by Toast and used to burn the CD.
