when adding tracks to a montage to build a CD is it common practice to put all of the songs on a single montage “track”… or, stagger them… or put them all on separate tracks?
in typical WL manual style… it shows HOW to do things, but not WHY you’d want to do various things. the manual mentions nothing about the advantages or disadvantages of the various track stacking modes or why you’d want to use one over another…
what do people typically do for CD playlists?
thanks!
For normal albums, I always stagger but it really depends on your needs, if you think you might have some slight clip overlaps, staggering is the way to go. If you know for a fact that no clips will never overlap, you can get away with a single montage track.
It really depends but my default settings for 99% of albums is to stagger because it makes arranging the clips and dialing in the fades/crossfades much easier to me. When I’m doing DDP assembly for a CD broker and my job is to simply alight the WAV files in order with no spaces, I can do it on a single track but for any artistic work, I usually have two tracks and maybe 3 if the album has a sound byte to throw in before a song.
But then I again, I think I requested the staggering option so maybe I’m biased 
Before WaveLab 9, I spent a lot of time manually staggering the files. Maybe it’s just my habits.
I put all songs/clips in one Montage track and put the spaces I want between the songs as part of the montage. I use customized plug in effect settings for each song/clip - typically the EQ and the Imager in Master Rig and a Waves L3-16 (with dither deactivated). Additionally, I check the “Envelope after Effects” for each song so that the fades in the songs occur after the effects. In the Master Section I have my dithering - I use the MBit +. I use no other effects in the Master Section though I will enable the Playback Processing to check how MP3s would sound etc.
thanks… that’s what i figured… and i’ve been staggering them, too… it’s just the way i’m used to seeing layouts from the days of Peak and DSP Quattro. as long as there is not really a “right” or “wrong” i think i’m OK
another question… maybe i should start a new thread… but, i’ve got a montage with two tracks (5 & 6) that crossfade…
when i export the whole thing as a DDP and play it via a DDP player, it plays fine. if you start track 6 from the track ID, it has a hard start… as it should… because it’s in the middle of the crossfade…
however… when i export the montage as all individual WAV files… it has track 5 ending abruptly, in the middle of the crossfade… but track 6 isn’t starting abruptly… it’s rendering out track 6 as it’s smooth, original fade in… …
if that makes sense… i can’t get the individual WAV file export to export that track 6 properly…
Yes, choose “All Regions” and “CD Tracks” and it should be OK. To get very precise, you may want to make sure you CD track markers are quantized before you make the DDP and render the WAV files, or else there could be very small variations between the two.
This is assuming you are using all CD Track Splice Makers. If you are using start/end markers, use the newly added render option to “Include Pause After Track”
thanks again…! yes, there are so many options… and learning the program after 20 years of BIAS Peak is a learning curve… but i’m liking it a lot.
i wish the individual WAV export allowed for taking the names from the CD text… so they automatically output a bit more “official” looking… instead of simply as the file names that were used in the Montage…
DSP Quattro is great at doing this (and is, overall, a much easier, tho a bit less deep layout/DDP creator)
You can easily rename the markers from CD-Text in one click. Or vise versa, you can properly name the markers and then apply those to CD-Text in one-click using the CD-Text Editor box. My files are already properly named before loading into WaveLab, so the markers are therefore properly named and then easily pushed to CD-Text.
Check the CD Tab and then Functions>Rename CD Tracks as Text to rename your markers as CD-Text titles.
I assume you know how to populate all the CD-Text Track names from markers if you choose that method?
Then of course you can add a two digit numeric prefix to the WAVs so they remain in order. I also have a preset to tag mp3/WAV/AAC with as much metadata as possible from the CD-Text info:
thank you so much again… i’m just getting into the montage after spending a month getting comfortable with the editing workflow.
i totally missed that Function command… should have seen it… brilliant.
how, however, do you put a 2-digit prefix in front of the file name? (without naming the files as such)… see a command in the CD-Wiaard for CD MARKER NAMING but it uses a generic name “TRACK” and not the individual track/cd text name
also haven’t gotten into all of that metadata tagging yet…
I use the naming scheme to add a two digit prefix to the front of the rendered file names. This prefix doesn’t get added to any CD-Text or metadata, just the WAV file names. I believe there is a numeric prefix option in the naming scheme area of the render ribbon tab.
brilliant… thank you…
i tried adding another field to that naming scheme… namely ALBUM/PERFORMER so i could get the artist name in there… but the export didn’t add anything… nor did it add a TWO digit number prefix
but i’ll keep poking around…
i really appreciate the help!
No problem. The naming scheme is pretty powerful and should be able to do what you ask, but it does take some time to get familiar with it.
figured it out… and saved a preset… thanks again!!!