Hi Rat,
I’m pretty sure you can do all of this already. I make a lot of vinyl pre-masters so I know just what you mean.
When I make a vinyl pre-master, I keep the normal CD track markers that already exist for the CD and digital master. Then, I render a 24-bit WAV of each side of the record. Basically all pressing plants and lacquer cutters like to recieve just one file per side so they don’t have to do any guesswork. So I’m basically providing one WAV file and one PDF Audio CD Report of each side of the record. In the Audio CD Report settings, you can omit the 2 second gap by deselecting “Start Time on CD” and selecting "Start Time (in audio montage). There are some other options you may or may not want on your report for the vinyl pre-masters.
The great thing about WaveLab 9 is that we now have CD Track Groups. The name is misleading because what CD Track Groups are great for is defining album sides for vinyl and cassette pre-masters.
In the past, I had to make a separate montage for side A and B because if you use just one montage for both sides, the Audio CD Report for side B would not make sense with the audio file. The song that starts side B on the vinyl might start at 18 minutes in the montage, but of course starts at 0:00 on the audio file. This is no use for anybody.
With the new CD Track Groups, you can tell the montage where side B starts (and C and D for 2xLP). This means that the vinyl pre-master can all be done in one montage, but you can make audio files and reports that are relative to the album sides.
You can choose to render only a specific CD Track Group, and then in the Audio CD Report settings you can choose to make a report for just a certain CD Track Group. This means that the track times on the Audio CD Report will match perfectly with the track times on the continuous audio file you render for each side. You can verify this by telling WaveLab to “Copy Markers” when the files are rendered. Then open the rendered files independently and compare the marker times against the times on the Audio CD Report for each track group just to be sure.
It sounds a little more complex than it is. I do a few of these a week and it’s so easy and efficient. It’s a major time saver over the old way of doing it prior to WaveLab 9, or in any other mastering DAW that I’m aware of.
I have a few Audio CD Report presets made up for vinyl, with a special note for 88.2k or 96k so I can tell the lacquer cutter what the sample rate is and that it’s one file per album side.
Then of course, they have a PDF read-out of all the track ID times so they know where the songs start and end. Also, by copying the markers when rendering the WAV files for each side, there is a chance that the DAW they use can read the markers.
I’ll attach a zip of two PDF files from a recent project so you can see how it can look. The two reports were both generated from one single montage, but CD Track Groups were used to get the report for side B to start over at 0:00 to match the corresponding audio file for side B.
VINYL_PDF_EXAMPLE.zip (122 KB)