Technical Info

Vinyl Cutting Levels

By Nick Landis on Tuesday Jan, 11th 2022

There are lots of things to consider when planning to release your music on vinyl. Among these things to consider is where the split between the A-side and B-side is. In order to figure that out, you'll need to know some basic information about your album like the length of the songs and how many of them there are. In addition to that, you will need to consider other things like what size record you'll be pressing and how much audio can fit on that size record.

Capitalization of Track Titles

By Nick Landis on Wednesday Mar, 1st 2017

This is a common issue that many of my clients don't think about until they're in the mastering studio getting asked about it. Did you mean to not capitalize this word? Well, here are some guidelines.

.cda file format

By Nick Landis on Monday Oct, 17th 2011

Often a source of confusion is the .cda file.  On a windows computer, when you insert a RedBook Audio CD, the tracks show up as .cda files.  One might assume that these are the audio files on the disc because they are the only items that show up in the explorer window. . . that would be wrong.  The .cda files are merely placeholders pointing to a place on the CD that the song starts.  Think of them as what windows calls a 'shortcut'.

DDP Masters

By Nick Landis on Monday Aug, 8th 2011

In the past few months, we've had several requests for masters to be sent over the internet to the manufacturing plant.  DDP is the perfect format for this.  Many plants will give you FTP information to send the DDP master to their facility or a login to a webpage that you can upload the file.  I like this trend and recommend this for clients that have chosen replicators that accept DDP masters.

QR Code

By Matt Eskey on Tuesday Jun, 21st 2011

We just pressed our first CDs that feature a QR code on the packaging. When the artist, songwriter Tonya Tyner, handed in her artwork, I didn't even know what the black and white square on the back of the digipak was. Now it seems like I am seeing them everywhere. When she told me that it was readable by smart phones and that you could have it link to a variety of functions, I thought it sounded like a great idea.

Loudness Wars

By Nick Landis on Monday Apr, 11th 2011

SINCE THE 1990's AND THE ADVENT OF BROAD DISTRIBUTION OF DIGITAL AUDIO, POPULAR MUSIC HAS STEADILY BEEN CREEPING LOUDER AND LOUDER.  DIGITAL AUDIO MUST BE COMPRESSED

AFTER PEAK AMPLITUDE IS REACHED (AT 0DBFS) TO BECOME LOUDER.  HAVE YOU EVER RECEIVED AN EMAIL OR TEXT MESSAGE THAT LOOKS LIKE THIS?  It's just a bit obnoxious, isn't it?

Foreign Characters in CD-Text

By Nick Landis on Monday Mar, 28th 2011

I've had several projects in the past that were Spanish language music.  With most music sung/written in Spanish, they had titles that were also in Spanish.  Spanish, along with several other languages, is different from English due to a few extra letters in the alphabet (letters with accents and the like).  Several words had accents that without the accents meant other things.  I knew I could encode several of the accents that showed up some places but not others.  A