Sonic Foundry CD Architect

Writing audio CDs is getting easier and easier, especially with this new release for the PC from Sonic Foundry. Martin Walker rubs two files together and goes for the burn.

CD‑R is becoming a far more common way for musicians to pre‑master new albums, as well as to keep backups of work. In the past, it's often been difficult to buy software packages that cater for musicians, since the burning of audio CDs tends to require different features from those for burning CD‑ROM and other CD formats: a means of adjusting the gap time between tracks from the default two seconds (for artistic purposes); a way to add extra track indexes part way through a long piece of music (which will enable continuous live recordings to be played on a track‑by‑track basis); and a means of cross‑fading between two tracks (which needs zero length gap time).

CD Architect is a new audio editor and CD‑burning software package from the makers of the well‑respected Sound Forge audio editor — with the recent arrival of the version 1.6 update of Steinberg's WaveLab (also reviewed in this issue), which also includes CD‑R support, things seem to be finally hotting up in the audio CD‑R stakes. WaveLab 1.6 proved more than capable of fulfilling basic audio CD requirements, and had the advantage of being a free upgrade for existing version 1.5 owners, but Sonic Foundry have chosen a slightly different route, supplying CD Architect as a separate package, complete with Sound Forge XP (a cut‑down version of Sound Forge 4.0b). CD Architect is still a plug‑in, so existing Sound Forge 4 users can install it as an integral part of their existing audio editor, but new purchasers effectively get a complete stand‑alone package, albeit with the rather reduced feature set of the XP editing section.

Getting Started

Installation is simplicity itself. From the opening menu screen (which also allows you to install demo versions of all other Sonic Foundry products), you can either install CD Architect as a plug‑in if you already have Sound Forge 4.0b, or install the supplied Sound Forge XP to run it. There's even an auto‑detect option, which looks for an existing Sound Forge installation. Copy protection is through a unique 'activation code' number supplied on a small label stuck inside the manual, which is one of the more benign systems available. The setup program will ask for this code to be entered again if you ever re‑install the program, but the program itself remains mercifully free of dongles or hidden files. Once the installation is complete, CD Architect simply appears as an additional item in the Sound Forge Tools menu. The size of the plug‑in install is about 5Mb, but demo WAV files are also provided, which bring the total up to about 11Mb (you can delete these later on if you want to reclaim the space).

Main Screen Features

Although CD Architect needs either Sound Forge 4 or XP as a launch pad, it seems to use only their underlying audio routines: once its own window appears, it is self‑contained, and you don't have access to any of the other Sound Forge menu items. The screen layout can be customised, but it has five main components: the Audio Pool, the Track View, the Time Ruler, the Playlist and the PQ list.

Complex volume‑adjustment envelopes can be created, and the beauty of these is that they are totally non‑destructive, applied only during playback and when the CD is finally burned.

When you open a new CD Project, you start by adding WAV files to the Audio Pool. Files can be selected en masse by shift‑clicking, so you can grab a whole selection of files for a project in one go. There's also a Read Audio option that allows you to digitally grab any part of an existing CD to import to your project (from SCSI CD drives only). The Audio Pool's contents appear in the middle of the right‑hand side of the screen display, and any of the sound files here can be clicked and dragged to the Track View window, where they appear as a graphical wave display. Alternatively, you can right‑click on the file and choose Add as Track, and in this case regions are dropped after any existing ones in the Track View window, with a default two‑second gap, which can be changed via a Preference setting — there are no restrictions on gap lengths. Further items can be dragged from the pool and dropped anywhere in the Track Window in relation to existing regions.

Above the wave display is the Time Ruler, and this is the absolute time reference for each entire CD Project. Beneath the wave display is the marker strip, which displays the track or index tabs. Again, you can click and drag these, and the track tabs have an additional feature: if you click between track start and end tabs, both are picked up, making it easy to move an entire track without altering its length.

The Playlist appears beneath the Track view, and this is a text‑based list of the audio regions, in chronological order. It contains the start times, end times, lengths and names of each region currently in your CD Project (as displayed in the Track View). You can click on any field and then edit it using the keyboard. You can also click on the row number (to the left of the actual data), and drag this up or down to a different position, to re‑order tracks. It took me a few tries to get the hang of this — you first click on the desired numbered row and release the mouse button, and then click a second time and drag to actually move the track to a new position. This two‑click approach allows you the option of clicking and dragging across several rows to select multiple tracks, so that the second click and drag moves several tracks simultaneously. One minor bug report here — I managed to crash the program by dragging a non‑existent track about (but my First Aid 97 crash protection utility let me recover and continue with no further problems).

Beneath the Playlist is the PQ List — another text‑based list, containing track IDs, sub‑indices and markers in chronological order. Markers are not written to the CD; they simply mark any position for your own purposes. In addition to the information contained in the Playlist, the PQ list includes editable fields for copy protect flags, pre‑emphasis flags and ISRC (Industry Standard Recording Codes) data. You do all your editing in the same way: by clicking, dragging and keyboard entry. The final part of the screen display is the Transport/Master Panel, and this simulates the controls of a CD player, allowing you to play back tracks with all the pauses and settings of your proposed CD. The standard Play, Stop, Next, Previous, Fast Forward, and Fast Reverse buttons are provided, along with Continuous Play (Cycle) and an extra button labelled Emulate CD. When Emulate CD is off, the Next/Previous Event moves between each start and end marker in turn; when it's on, the Next/Previous Event acts just like a real CD player, jumping between track starts. Track and index indicators are also shown, and these are exactly what the display of a CD player will show when it plays your CD. The final components in the Master panel are two Master Faders, which allow overall levels to be set for the entire CD. These affect monitor levels as well as the final levels written to the CD, and a readout of their current settings appears beneath the faders, calibrated from +20dB to ‑Inf (Infinity).

In Use

Once you have several items in the Audio Pool, and have dragged them into the Track View window, operation is fairly intuitive. If you have a long recording of a live performance to which you want to add track starts, you can insert additional ones at the current cursor position by right‑clicking on the tab line and choosing the Insert option. Adjusting the gaps between tracks is simply a matter of dragging the waveform left or right until the pause sounds just right, and you can shift‑click multiple tracks — for instance, adjusting the gap between tracks one and two while all the subsequent tracks move a bit to the right.

Once you move the cursor near the centre line across each waveform, it changes to a small hand, and you can then alter the overall volume of the track, in 0.1dB increments. If you grab one of the two small squares at each end of the line, you can alter the level of one end of the track relative to the other; or, by shift‑clicking anywhere along the line, add an additional point to create a fade in or out. Complex volume‑adjustment envelopes can be created, and the beauty of these is that they are totally non‑destructive, applied only during playback, and when the CD is finally burned. This means that the actual track data remains unchanged, which not only speeds up the editing process, but means that you're not constantly worrying about backing up your music data before attempting to tweak another fade.

What will impress most people even more is that if you grab an entire track and drag it so that its start overlaps the end of the previous one, a real‑time crossfade is automatically created, again without altering the data of either track. This is one of the best implementations that I've seen on the PC. I've seen crossfading done using a 4‑track Macintosh package to accommodate the overlap of two stereo track pairs, and also using a stereo Mac package with most of the RAM acting as a crossfade buffer, which limits the length of the crossfade to the amount of memory in the machine. CD Architect has no such limitations.

CD Architect will write data directly from your hard drive to the CD, at the same time as calculating all the volume envelopes, crossfades and mixes in real time.

The one thing that caused me confusion initially was having both a Playlist and PQ List, with many duplicated fields. This does give more versatility, since the PQ list can contain many more entries if you insert additional track indexes part way through a single audio region, but, until you work through the supplied tutorial, it can be confusing. The thing to remember is that the Playlist is associated with the waveforms, and the PQ List with the markers. I mostly worked direct with the Track View, using the Playlist for changing the track order, and the PQ list for adding extra Track indexes.

CD Burning

Once you have your audio data assembled, with the appropriate inter‑track gaps or crossfades, burning the CD follows the same path as in most other packages. There are test modes to verify compliance with the Red Book standard, which also allow a 'dummy run' before the actual write; then, as long as your PC is powerful enough, CD Architect will write data directly from your hard drive to the CD, at the same time as calculating all the volume envelopes, crossfades and mixes in real time. Sonic Foundry recommend a Pentium and a minimum of 8Mb RAM, but are no more specific than that. If you already use your PC for hard disk recording, you should have no problems with real‑time CD burning; even with a less powerful machine, you still have the option of creating an image file (if you have about 600Mb spare on your hard disk) which will incorporate these real‑time operations, so that the final burn can still be carried out.

Summary

This is a lovely package. Once you have either read the manual, or followed one of the supplied tutorials, most operations are fairly intuitive. At £259 for a stand‑alone application, this is far and away the cheapest 'professional' audio‑CD‑writing package on the market. WaveLab 1.6 is currently £399, and Red Roaster is £500 in its 16‑bit version, and £700 in the full 24‑bit version. I can't help feeling, though, that existing Sound Forge 4 owners would have preferred a cheaper 'plug‑in only' version.

The graphics of CD Architect are a lot more integrated than WaveLab 1.6's, which the 'click and drag' brigade will prefer, but both packages are an all‑in‑one solution, rather than the two‑stage process of Red Roaster. However, if you want easy fades and crossfades, and prefer to leave your tracks unedited so that they can be re‑compiled for other projects, the real‑time nature of CD Architect takes some beating.