D. Editing the digital masters to final form for your CD tracks

The procedures and functions of sound recording and editing programs are all very similar. The descriptions and screenshots on this page are all based on Windows XP and the Acoustica program, but they are so similar to the behavior on the Macintosh and in many other programs that there is little need for separate descriptions and screenshots.  Malcintosh users should read through this page as if it were for a Mac, and they will find a link at the bottom of this page to a brief description of some minor differences.
1. Selecting the Individual CD Tracks from your Master Tracks.
a. How sound editing programs work:
The sound editing feature that is essential and common to most audio conversion projects is the selecting out and creating from your master tracks the individual tracks for your CD.  The process for doing this is similar in all sound programs, and it's very much like copying- or cutting-and-pasting sections of text in a word-processing program.  Except, instead of pages of text, we are dealing here with sound waveforms extending over many minutes of time -- graphs showing the amplitude of the recorded sound wave (vertical) as a function to time (horizontal) in seconds or minutes. These sound waveforms look like this:


The sound waveform display shows both stereo channels:   left (top) and right (bottom).

The timescale is hard to read along the top of the above screenshot (it's a lot easier in the actual working display), but if you look carfully (and have good eyesight), you will be able to see that it runs from 00:00:00:000 on the left to 00:10:00:000 about 3/4 of the distance to the right edge, with six tic-marks in between.  The format here is hh:min:sec:millisec, so each tic-mark is 10 minutes and total length of the sound waveform shown is about 13 minutes.

Sound programs have Zoom controls to allow zooming in (stretching) to see more detail in the waveform, and zooming out (squeezing) to see more of the waveform, including the entire recorded track or file. By default, the Acoustica program (Windows, above)  zooms all the way out to show the entire length of the sound; in this program, the  zoom controls are found in the menu
View menu --> Zoom in, Zoom out
Selection of portions of the sound waveform:

Sound-editing programs allow the user to select a portion of the waveform on which to operate.  This selection process is much like that in word-processiing and other common computer programs. 
  • Click on the Selection tool (arrow) in the toolbar to click to place the cursor into Selection mode.
  • Place your cursor at a point on the waveform, and click-and-drag over the selection you want;
    • clicking above near the top of the left channel or bottom of the right channel selects only in that channel;
    • clicking near the bottom of the left channel or top of the righ channel (nearest the other channel) selects the waveform in both channels.
As in a word-processing program, the actions you take generally apply to the selected portion of the waveform.

You can cut, copy, and paste waveforms to move them from one place to another, using these familiar Edit menu commands; there may also be a toolbar with tools for these functions. 

b. How-to-Do-It Procedure -- selecting and creating individual CD tracks:
Before you start this process, you should have a pretty good idea of what is on your mastertrack.wav files(s) and how you want to split them up into individual tracks for your final CD. You will proceed differently in selecting out and saving the individual track files if you are
  • taking them from a single mastertrack in much the same order they appear there, versus
  • taking the individual tracks from several different mastertracck.wav files.
Start by opening your mastertrack.wav file:  File menu --> Open.
  1. Identify the first section you want to extract as an individual-track file. You can identify the beginning and end of this section by
    • playing back trial selections until you find the start and end points on the waveform;
    • playing back from the cursor position;
    • looking for spaces (gaps, periods with a few seconds of relative silence) between individual songs/movements/etc.
    • you can more clearly mark the beginning and end of a track by placing the cursor  at the point you wish to mark and using the command Edit menu --> Insert Silence ... to insert a specified number of seconds of flatline silence in your waveform.

  2. Select the section of waveform for the first track (be sure to select both channels if stereo)

  3. Copy this selection to the clipboard (Edit menu --> Copy)

  4. Open a new sound document (File menu --> New --> Recording ...)

  5. Paste the clipboard into the new sound document
    • if you've copied two stereo channels, they should paste into the two stereo channels of the new document;
    • if you've copied one mono channel to the clipboard, and it doesn't automatically paste into both stereo channels of the new document, paste it separately into the 2nd channel.

  6. Do a Save as ... command to immediately save the new sound document with a name identifying the track; e.g., 01Xmas67.wav for the first track of a Christmas 1967 CD); this track should be saved inside your workingtracks folder

  7. Go back to Step 1. above and repeat the process for the remaining tracks of your CD.
At this point, you should have working copies of all the tracks needed for your CD in a folder named workingtracks (or whatever name you have picked).