A few things:
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Creating CD Track Splice Markers using the CD wizard is definitely the way to go in 2018. Any spacing between songs lives on the previous track aside from ~200ms as a buffer between the CD Track Splice Marker and the first beat or sign of audio, assuming it’s not an album with overlapping or continuous audio such as a live album.
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You can set a preference for how much time exists between each audio clip when you import multiple clips into a new montage. This setting can be saved as part of your default montage template or other addtional templates. I chose 0 seconds as I like to manually feel out the spacing for each song.
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If you need to move clips around to manually adjust the spacing between songs, Ripple Mode is ESSENTIAL. You can activate Ripple Mode globally for all montage tracks or just per-track if for some reason that is better. I always have Global Ripple Mode on and then I just turn it off in the rare cases where I don’t want the following clips to follow along when adjusting the space between songs/clips.
Once this is done you can re-quantize the CD Track Splice Markers to the nearest CD frame so your DDP track markers will be 100% the same as your rendered WAV or mp3 track markers.
Here is my process:
- Make a new montage from my default template
- Import songs/clips and arrange them in order using the Import menu before they are inserted on the timeline
- Manually fine tune the spacing between each song add taper any fade outs on the clip(s) as needed. I’m in global ripple mode so all the following clips maintain their relationship.
- Use the CD Wizard to add CD Track Splice Makers for each song/clip, with the Quantize To Nearest CD Frame option turned on.
DONE.
The CD Track markers are perfectly named as the song title because I have perfectly named the clips during my REAPER analog play and capture session during the export from REAPER. Then they can be easily pushed to CD-Text and eventually metadata with just a few clicks. A big time saver.
The files I insert into the montage automatically contain 200ms of digital black silence before the audio starts because I have REAPER add this when I export the printed versions of the songs. This way when WaveLab puts the CD Track Splice Marker at the start of each clip, it’s not too close to the downbeat and I don’t have to manually manage the start markers to create a short buffer. There is a way globally move all markers by a certain amount though if needed.
If I need to adjust the track spacing later, I stay in Global Ripple Mode, adjust the song spacing and all the following songs maintain their relationship with no need to select them all, re-quantize the CD Track Splice Markers to the nearest CD frame, and carry on.