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All information in these pages is copyright (c) 1989-2003 by Roger Nichols. All rights reserved. Permission for personal reference only, and may not be reproduced by any method without written permission.

That Really Burns My &%$*

By Roger Nichols

Burn Baby Burn

Remember last month I talked about my portable audio editing system for the road? Spark XL, Toast 4.1 Deluxe, Jam 2.6 and Vxpocket PCM card for digital in and out of a Powerbook G3/500. Well, it almost worked.

Four days before a syndicated radio broadcast of the Steely Dan PBS TV show I got a call asking for an edited version with just the music portion of the show with the audience reaction put back in the show. All of my copies were in Miami on DLT-7000 tapes, while I was in a hotel room in Washington DC. Nobody was at my studio to make me a copy from the DLT tape, (hey, I gave them two weeks off) so I called River Sound where we mixed the show. We had printed the final mix to two tracks of the 48 track digital machine, so they just copied those tracks off to a CD from the digital outputs.

I was gloating when they asked me if I needed to find a studio to edit the show. "What, are you kidding? I can do stuff like this in my hotel room. Just give me a direct line to room service and I’ll be done by tomorrow."

I fired up the Powerbook, launched Spark, and ripped the audio tracks off of the CDs. I imported all of the cuts into Spark and proceeded to edit all 14 songs together with brilliant crossfades and superb level control.

Altogether the radio show was 74:34 with no blank space between cuts. This would require cutting the CD in disc-at-once mode. Not possible with Toast 4.1, but possible with Toast 4.1 Deluxe or Jam 2.6. Jam was my choice because you can audition the transitions between tracks before you cut the CD. Version 2.6 also supports FireWire and USB CD burners.

From Spark, you click on the CD icon and Spark builds an image file for Jam, loads Jam, and opens the newly created image file. There it was. The completed CD image just waiting for the BURN command. I previewed all of the transitions to make sure that there were no glitches added by Spark when it made the Jam disc image. Everything was perfect. I inserted a blank CD in the QPS 8x FireWire CD recorder and clicked on BURN. Life in a hotel digital editing suite was good. Or so I thought.

After the finished CD was ejected I popped it into my portable CD player to listen to the whole thing. All 74:34 of it. Everything was perfect until I got to the transition between cut 10 and cut 11. As the audience was fading out there was a loud half-second chunk of audience, a very short space of nothing, and the first attack of cut 11 was distorted. It sounded like a recording (a pretty good recording actually) of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir during a train wreck inserted between my two CD cuts.

I went back and listened to the image file in Jam. The transition was fine. No glitches. My first thought was that Spark had placed some illegal pointers in the image file that corrupted the CD-R, but sounded fine in preview mode. I went back to Spark and made a different crossfade between tracks 10 and 11, produced a new image file, and previewed it in Jam. The preview was fine. I burned another CD and listened. The same Gawd-Awful glitch in the same spot. Who can I kill! I can’t kick my dogs; they are safe in Miami.

Maybe it was some very weird hardware based error in of the CD burner? I cut out one of the earlier tracks so that the transition between cuts 10 and 11 would happen in a different physical spot on the disc. New image file, new CD burn, then a listen. The same glitch in the same musical spot. Not hardware.

Maybe it was a Jam software error. I reconfigured Spark to use Toast 4.1 Deluxe instead of Jam. I put the missing cut back in, made a new image file, selected disc-at-once mode in Toast and burned another CD. Same glitch in the same place. With nobody else in my hotel room I was soon to become the target of my own rage.

It was now two days before the airdate of the radio show and I had nothing to send. I was supposed to send my CD master to SFX Radio for them to duplicate and send on to the radio stations. This is all made worse by the fact that each afternoon I have to leave the hotel and go to the venue for that night’s Steely Dan show. After this show we were going to fly to West Palm Beach, have a day off, and then more shows.

I took all of my hardware to the show venue. Maybe in the two hours between sound check and the show I could figure something out. I moved all of the software and audio files over to the G4/500 at the show, thinking that maybe it had something to do with the Powerbook. The tour manager was aware of the time crunch for delivery of the master CD and kept coming by and asking "How we doin’." My blank stare and bleeding fingers was enough of a reply.

Ok! Last chance. Go into Spark, change all of the crossfade points just a hair, make an image file, check the transitions in Jam, and burn the CD. Now, pop the CD into a player and listen. Exactly the same glitches in exactly the same spot. Walk to the edge of the stage. Not high enough to hurt myself. I should have thought of this back at the hotel.

PLAN B

After the show we flew to West Palm Beach. We got there at 1:30 AM. I had a car waiting to drive me 100 miles to Miami. I arrived at 3:00 AM and fired up my studio. I was ready to start over with the whole process. Re-enter the songs, re-do the edits and burn the CDs on a system I knew worked. It is now Monday morning. I am in Miami. SFX was expecting the master in LA at 10:00 AM TODAY and I have nothing to send them. Will there be 74:34 of silence broadcast for the Steely Dan radio show? How will they know where to insert the commercials?

Before I start completely over, let me just try one thing. I transfer the software and audio files, including the already generated Jam image file, over to my Mac 9600 with SCSI CD burner. I start Jam, load the image file, and listen to the same transitions. Everything is still perfect in preview mode. I insert a blank CD and click on BURN. The finished CD ejects; I pop it in the same CD player and Yippee! Perfect. All of the transitions are perfect. Everything is fine.

I listened to the whole CD once more to make sure. Still perfect. I called FedEx and sent the Master via Same Day FedEx to LA. By 1:00 PM SFX had the master, made the copies, and sent them to the radio stations. Saved by the bill. The FedEx bill. $193 for same day service to LA. Ouchie!

The problem had to be either the QPS drive or the FireWire driver for Toast and Jam (they both use the same extension). I emailed Adaptec about the problem. They responded a couple of days later:

"Although QPS supports it, we know that disc-at-once does not currently work with the QPS drives in our software. We are working on an update to fix this issue."

Also On the Burner

The new Steely Dan DVD is jam packed with Video, PCM, AC-3, and DTS. There have been some complaints about the audio not being in sync with the video. It turns out that most players can’t keep up with the 10mb/sec data rates and the video is delayed slightly because of processing time. This makes the audio sound early. It is different with every player, and depends on which audio track you are listening to. I guess if you really want to hear it right you are going to have to buy a Denon DVD player and a Lexicon MC-1 pre-amp for decoding the audio. About $8,000 for both.

Oh well. It usually feels good to be on the bleeding edge of technology. This time I think I am going to need a transfusion. Maybe two transfusions.