A suggestion about moving CD track markers

WaveLab
1

I have a suggestion for improving WL relating to CD track markers.

This involves relocating markers to fall on CD frames using the Move Multiple Markers dialog > Quantize to CD frames. The issue is that WL may decide to move the marker either forward or backwards based, I guess, on which CD frame is closest to the marker. That sometimes results in this condition, where the marker is outside the body of the clip and thus exists at a point where there is no audio data:

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The problem is that WL does not seem to notice this end marker when rendering files (Render > All Marked Regions) and I believe the same is true for Tools > Auto Split by markers. WL will silently skip the last track/region, presumably because it isn’t a complete region because it has no end marker. The unwanted result is that the last track isn’t generated. There’s no explicit indication of this, either.

My suggestion is that WL try not to place a CD track marker outside of the audio of the clip to which it is attached unless the marker would fall within another clip. A CD end marker, in particular, should always have a clip offset of zero or less in relation to the clip whose right edge ends the furthest along the timeline.

I realize that might sound intuitive for a simple, linear sort of montage, but might be unworkable in a complex arrangement of tracks and lanes. Perhaps an alternative could be a global preference to move the last marker backwards, or an option on the Move Multiple Markers dialog to specify that. Another solution could be to explicitly look for such orphaned markers and either flag them before rendering, or let the user specify padding the space between after the end of the audio and the marker with zeros (which is how sector boundary errors are usually dealt with after the fact when burning CDRs).

I hope this is helpful

2

I don’t understand what you say here.

3

When the CD track end marker is placed beyond the end of the audio, for example in the image below, the final track is not rendered to a separate file.

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Of course, when I render this montage to provide a concrete example, I do get a track05! So I need to examine again when exactly this happens. But it happened to me about two weeks ago, and has happened many times before. I need to look again at when it happens.

In any case, I still think it is a strange result to move a marker to a position outside of all clips, like the track end marker is here.

4

If the end marker is moved to the left when quantizing markers to CD frames, you risk cutting off some actual audio (if the CD/Album Wizard has placed the marker exactly at the edge of the clip) so I think the logic was to move the end marker to the right so that when quantized to the nearest CD frame, it would not jeopardize cutting off any audio.

That said, pretty much every album I render is like this and I’ve never had it not render the last song so maybe something else is going on too.

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