Mastering some songs without pause

[yuyu]

I've used har-bal and so far the result is good.
I often hear from CD which is track/song 1 continously goes to track/song2 directly without pause and it continues until the end of the track/song. How should I apply it by using har-bal; whether I have to make it each track seperately with har-bal or all tracks are combined into one big track and then apply the har-bal process?
And let's say if I have the one big track, how to slice it into small tracks (track 1, 2, ...10) and when we play it, there will be no pause between track/song1 into track/song2...and so on until track/song 10?
Thx very much......................

[HarBal]

Har-Bal in its current incarnation doesn't handle this situation well. The best you can do for cases like this is to create two files, one for each track, that overlap by a fixed amount (say 0.5 seconds). Then you Harbalize each and re-combined them in you DAW with a cross fade. It's a bit of an ulgy process but it works. When Har-Bal supports partitioning this will not be necessary but unfortunately that feature hasn't been implemented yet.

Regards,


Paavo.

[zumbido]

I certainly would work on each song individually.

Most CD 'assembly' programs have this cross-fading feature. It's best to do it at this last stage so that you can add song IDs. You (or your audience) will soon wish there were individual song IDs after a few attempts to fast-forward into the 2nd, 3rd or last track to play a 'fav' song.

[yuyu]

Thx Paavo & Zumbido,

When I Harbalize track individually, each track has different graphic and I edit it differently from 1st track until the last track. Can the result be the same from 1st track to the next track until the last track? How to standarize each track?

As like Zumbido said, most CD 'assembly' programs have crossfading feature. Can you explain more detail what is CD 'assembly' programs? Is it like Nero or WaveLab?
Sorry if it's a stupid question... because I'm vey a new beginner in mastering.

Thx very much............

[zumbido]

I use Roxio (Mac).

It's very important to dither down to 16-bit before placing your song files into an assembly application.

I can only speak to doing this in Pro Tools on a Mac.

This is my 'typical' procedure:

1. mix in Pro Tools (Mac) - 24-bit/48k.

2. transfer audio file(s) to PC.

3. Har-Bal for EQ'ing - create an '_eq' file.

4. T-RackS for multiband limiting - create a (master) file.

5. Open this (master) file in Har-Bal and check numeric value (to match all songs on album). These are adjusted with the multiband limiter (step 4) by obtaining the desired target values from Har-Bal (step 3).

6. transfer file(s) to Mac.

7. open master file(s) in Pro Tools for editing, fades, etc.

8. bounce file(s) to disk through a buss master with a 16-bit dither plug-in at 44.1k.

9. place master file(s) in Roxio (if the numbers match, from song to song in Har-Bal, then the volume of all the songs will be the same).

10. burn CD - happy client.