Couple of Mentor Questions..

I just received Jeff at Tracer's newletter and he mentioned that there are a couple of new features in ver. 1.4. What are they?

Also, since I am a "newbie" when it comes to Mentor, I still trying to figure out all of it's capabilities, to determine when and if I need to shell out to DC6 for a particular task.

Most of my restoration work is with albums. Sometimes I need to trim the silence between individual tracks because of excessive silence. I just noticed something yesterday while working on a restoration and I don't know if it normal of the program or not. I was trying to 'trim' an excessive amount of silence between track2 and track3 on an album side. It was a single file that had been "marked" by Mentor to show where the tracks would be divided later. I began by selecting 'trim start', as it would be the start of track3. I highlighted track3 and made a rough highlight of the area I wanted to trim. It was actually a little bit longer than I wanted to trim, so I hit 'trim less' and the highlight moved to the beginning of the file. I found out that Mentor does allow for 'trims' within the file, because I successfully did that, but the 'trim start' and 'trim end' always refer to the beginning and end of the entire file.

Since Mentor treats even multiple tracks as one until the burn phase, I was wondering if this is normal? If it is, that is perfectly OK as I could shell out to DC6 and perform a chop function and finish within Mentor.

For those of you that are professional Mentor users out there this may seem like a dumb question, but at this point I am just trying to figure out what Mentor is capable of doing, so I know when to go to DC6 or when to stay within Mentor.

Any input would be appreciated..

GB

[Craig Maier]

GB -

Here are the features that have been added since version 1.0 in Mentor:

We've added zooming to the song selection marker menu as well as drag and drop. Mentor now supports multiple CD ROM drives, and also now splits a file into pieces and puts it into Bin3 en route to the CD making...that way the songs are split in a bin so you have each song individually rather than in a mass multiple wave file.

-----------------------------------

The editing features in Mentor are not its stength; DC6 is much more capable. However, the De-Noiser is more sophisticated than the EZ Clean in DC6/Forensics. Also, you should find that the new "Enhancer" feature is quite nice and very easy to use. Just click through the presets until you find the sound that you like and then tweek it with the few controls provided. Despite their small number, the combination of the presets and the controls will provide a nice and wide variety of audio enhancement capability.

[Geebster]

GB -

Here are the features that have been added since version 1.0 in Mentor:

We've added zooming to the song selection marker menu as well as drag and drop. Mentor now supports multiple CD ROM drives, and also now splits a file into pieces and puts it into Bin3 3 en route to the CD making...that way the songs are split in a bin so you have each song individually rather than in a mass multiple wave file.

Thanks for the info Craig... Boy, those are BIG improvements!!! Especially the splitting the file into pieces en route to the CD making process. That was the only thing in the program that was driving me a little batty... Having the file split in Bin3 will be a great help.

GB

[Craig Maier]

Mathematically Perfect RIAA

One other characteristic of all revisions of Mentor is its RIAA curve. It is realized differently than in DC6 in that it is mathematically "closed form". That makes it mathematically as perfect as it could possibly be with deviations from the ideal being only a very small fraction of a dB (+/- 0.0003 dB).

So, Mentor is the perfect companion to use with a perfectly flat phono preamplifier.

Keywords: Perfect RIAA Response, Ideal RIAA Response

[Geebster]

Another good reason to have Mentor in your arsenal of audio tools.

I'll get to play with it more as soon as my new hard drive arrives. Right now I'm about tapped out for space. I did go through a simple restoration and the new features work perfectly. Many thanks, Craig.

GB

[RWKMANN]

Bug to feature in one release

I love marketing. I initially complained that Mentor couldn't see my second CD drive and was told it was Nero or something I was doing or overlooking. Now it suddenly has become a new feature (support for multiple Cd drives)!

Roland

[Craig Maier]

Mentor was never designed with the intention of supporting multiple CD drives. After all, you only need one drive to make your CD, so we still do not comprehend the need for this feature anyway. And, the product was never advertised to support multiple drives. That was not one of its advertised features.

But we added it because you asked for it, not because it specifically made any sense to us. Clearly, it was not a bug, since our original Internal Design Reference Specification only called for one drive.

So, it is not marketing or some sort of gimick; it is a reaction to customer requests without regard to our own thoughts on the matter as to whether or not it made any sense.

While I am here, and for our future design reference, do you think that the product should support 5 drives, 10 drives, maybe 20 or perhaps 500? If so, why?

Please advise.

Craig

???

[Geebster]

I love marketing. I initially complained that Mentor couldn't see my second CD drive and was told it was Nero or something I was doing or overlooking. Now it suddenly has become a new feature (support for multiple Cd drives)!

Roland

I still stand by my original statement; that Nero is a very flaky CD creation software and almost ANYTHING will cause it to crash. I recently had a daughter card to allow multiple IDE drives to be installed into my computer. That daughter card worked flawlessly with all hardward and software EXCEPT Nero.

On the other hand the CD creator built within Mentor does EXACTLY what it is supposed to do and works well with all programs I have.

Personally, I think Mentor now (ver 1.4) is a HUGE improvement over 1.0. and I am extremely happy that Craig and Rick take the time to improve on their products from the urging of us consumers. Very few independent software developers will actually listen to their customers like Diamond Cut does.

I'm sorry you think it was a marketing ploy to allow multiple CD drives to be seen within Mentor. I KNOW better.

GB

[RWKMANN]

Why two CD/DVD Drives

Craig,

I started out with a R/W Drive and when I bought a R/W DVD/CD Drive I added it as a second drive. So I now have two drives and wanted access to both. That's it. When I initially asked about support for two or more drives no one mentioned "not in the spec" just "you must be doing something wrong or running some software (Nero) that causes this problem". Also, with the ability to add external USB drives it makes sense to have the ability to select a second drive. More than that (500?) is overkill and I think you know that.

I worked in the computer industry most of my adult life and many times have seen a bug turned into a new feature.

Roland

[Craig Maier]

Why don't you just get rid of the redundant drive? It just wastes electricity.

As I said before, it was not a bug. Mentor is designed to be a "Minimalist" program. It was designed to be easy to use; it has a very short learning curve. Part of that comes from it's minimum feature set to do the job. Clearly, it does not need to support multiple drives.

So, I must insist, that the feature was added as such. I still do not see the need for it; personally, I was against adding it because it adds even more confusion into the software - - - a software program that was desgined to be the bare bones minimum required to perform an audio restoration effectively and create a CD therefrom.

[Geebster]

GB -

Here are the features that have been added since version 1.0 in Mentor:

We've added zooming to the song selection marker menu as well as drag and drop.

I've now used Mentor 1.4 for several projects with excellent results... BUT.. call me thick-witted but I don't completely understand the 2 above mentioned features. I don't immediately see these features. Can you explain them a little bit?

GB