Markers lost when dithering from 24 to 16 bit

[Craig Maier]

Maybe one of the Diamond Cut Forensics users can comment on this although I know that most Forensics users are reluctant or not permitted by their employers to post on forums.

[Robert2413]

Robert -

I believe the CD burner is added as a convenience only, and so does not have all the features you might find in a stand-alone cd burning software. It is also burning at redbook standards, which I don't believe allow for the elimination of gaps (but I may be wrong on that).

In regard to your other issue, I would think you'd want to save your 24-bit files for archival purposes and burn the 16-bits to CD, but if you're just burning them to CD, then why is it inconvenient to mark the 16-bit rather than the 24-bit versions? I don't see the difference.

In terms of the 2-second gap and the quantize for CD, it comes in quite handy when you want to burn seemless CDs. You just need to use different software for burning them.

Now that I think about it, though, there must be a way around the 2-second gap problem because I buy commercial classical CDs that I assume are at redbook standards, and they will flow from one section to another. Is that when you see the counter counting backwards into negative numbers? I see that sometimes, where it says -2, -1, 0.

Dan

Let me be more specific.

First, I work in Fast Edit mode.

I have been transferring some 48 year old tapes of a high school chorus and band concert. In live concert situations, I prefer to keep audience ambience present between cuts, but I carefully shorten the gaps between selections so that the transitions appear seamless. I produce everything in 24-bit so I can easily change gains up or down and so that I can process certain parts of the files without worrying about losing significant resolution. (I purposely record the files about 10 dB quieter than I would at 16-bit so I have room to increase the level of anything that needs a boost.)

After the editing is complete but before I chop the file into pieces, I normalize the entire file to 0 dBfs so that the loudness balances between tracks remain as intended.

As part of the process of shortening the gaps between selections, I drop track markers as close as possible to the beginning of the next performance -- I am already working zoomed in to the beginning of the next track, so it is easy to do. Once I have the markers placed, I can do very convenient things like double click between the markers, have the resulting selection be *exactly* the area between the markers, and apply a filter or process, knowing that it is being applied at the correct boundaries.

It would be a complete waste of time to do this after the entire file was dithered to 16 bit; I would have to locate every gap between performances (there were 22 gaps in the last tape I edited), zoom in, and place the marker correctly.

Regarding burning with Brand x full-featured burner: I always use CUE files for this, which automatically do *not* insert 2-second gaps of silence. (You can imagine what a disaster this would be for a live concert CD.) Brand x also allows me to specify the number of copies of the CD I want to burn. Because I usually burn CDs for more than one person, this makes life easy.

DC6 was optimized for this workflow. The last steps in the process were to quantize the markers to fall on CD data block boundaries, chop the file into pieces, and have DC6 generate a CUE file. After that, I used the Brand x burner to burn the CDs.

While it is no big deal to move an edited file from DC7 to DC6 to do the same thing, it would be helpful if DC7 offered a "DC6 file chop" mode that worked exactly the same way as DC6 does.

[Dan McDonald]

ok - I didn't realize this was different for DC7 than for DC6. Sounds like Craig and Rick are already on that problem.

Dan

[rickc]

Robert

It is definitly an undesirable behavior that the markers get lost on the resolution change, I will change that. I wont call it a bug since the code works as I indended it to, it is just not too desirable that way.

And, it is a bug that the cue sheet export got lost from DC6. I will put that back in as well, that was intended to be there and got disconnected. It will open the dc tune library as it does now, and the playlist export will be functional.

I think that leaves us with the two second gap on the CD burner. DC7 uses the intrinsic Windows burning engine to do this and at the time, there was no way to eliminate the gap. It is now possible (with the release of Vista) to do a more full features job on the CD burner, but that will have to wait till the next full release of DCtools.

The issue about duplicating markers between the source and destination file, sound like a user preference to me.
I can see cases where you want them separate and cases where you want them to track.
I will look at putting in a user option to track markers in Classic edit mode.

Did I get all the issues? This is a long thread and I may have misses some of the fine points.

[zarat]

I too prefer to use the Classic mode.

There is an easy way to have markers from the source window copied to the destination. All you needs to do is "Clone Source" before doing any processing.

I use this all the time when processing different portions of the source differently. Where this does come unstuck, is that all of the markers required need to be in place beforehand. This fine for making CDs etc, but if new markers are added along the way there is no way to copy them.

I also agree that an option to "import" one, many or all markers to the Destination is highly desirable. I would suggest that it should be as a conscious action only, not automatic. This should keep everyone, including me, happy.

Bill

[rickc]

I guess I could make it a menu command to transfer source markers to destination. It would probably do a merge incase there were any markers already in the destination file.

[Brian]

Just to "review the bidding" here.....
25 hours after a multiple issue thread was begun, both developers of the software had joined in, "fixes" were underway and new features promised. This is a great example of why we value the DC team and their products so highly. (Had this been Microsoft with 10,000 programmers on payroll, they'd still be telling us it was our fault and to do a clean reload of the software!)
Thanks Rick and Craig.

[zarat]

Hi Rick,

Yes that is along the lines I was thinking. From a menu or a right click, all markers in the (user) selected area are merged with any existing already in the Destination. Possible?

Seconding Brian, thanks for great software that just keeps getting better!

Bill

[sus4chord]

Hi, Rick -

Thanks so much. I agree that transferring markers should be a user preference. I'm less interested in the actual implementation and more interested in the ability to make the markers appear in the destination file. A menu command would be wonderful; however, I would point out that a user option (maybe set on the preferences screen) to always do it would be nice, as well, especially for those times when we might be batch processing, which requires no user intervention between files.

But either way, THANK YOU! That just saves times, shouldn't affect the forensics folks, and provides a great new feature for those of us who use the product more for audio restoration purposes.

[Robert2413]

Robert

It is definitly an undesirable behavior that the markers get lost on the resolution change, I will change that. I wont call it a bug since the code works as I indended it to, it is just not too desirable that way.

And, it is a bug that the cue sheet export got lost from DC6. I will put that back in as well, that was intended to be there and got disconnected. It will open the dc tune library as it does now, and the playlist export will be functional.

I think that leaves us with the two second gap on the CD burner. DC7 uses the intrinsic Windows burning engine to do this and at the time, there was no way to eliminate the gap. It is now possible (with the release of Vista) to do a more full features job on the CD burner, but that will have to wait till the next full release of DCtools.

The issue about duplicating markers between the source and destination file, sound like a user preference to me.
I can see cases where you want them separate and cases where you want them to track.
I will look at putting in a user option to track markers in Classic edit mode.

Did I get all the issues? This is a long thread and I may have misses some of the fine points.

It looks like you got all of my issues regarding this. (I'm going to start another thread about a non-related feature request.)

Thanks for your prompt response. I'm looking forward to the release that has these changes in it.