Editing/Burning Red Book CDs in 2023

[Jefus]

It very well might feel like this is a dated subject. It might be. Nonetheless, I want to be able to create real, compliant, Red Book CDs with control over CD Text, ISRC Codes, etc.

I have a few programs that can create the necessary DDP files. One of which is T-Racks. It's pretty intuitive, and gives you some last minute mastering ability as well.

However, my attempts so far to burn the DDP files have not been completely successful. I added a plugin in Foobar2000 to do this, but it only brought the layout with it, and not the rest of the data.

What are you all using these days? I'm looking at Hofa, but don't want to spend ~$100 if I can avoid it. Are there any free options?

I'll likely be doing this from Windows 10 as I have an optical burner on my desktop. I do have a Mac machine as well, but it doesn't have optical capability.

 

[Jefus]

In case anyone else ever needs this info, I'll go ahead and post it.

I used T-Racks 5 to assemble the cue, add CD text, ISRC codes, etc., and export the cue. I then used a free program called ImgBurn to burn the cue to disc. I checked the final in my wife's 2015 Honda and all the CD text popped right up on the screen, so I'm calling this a success!

 

[winston]

I was gonna say HOFA. If you are working with a pro mastering engineer I believe it's legit (license-wise) for them to give you a HOFA-wrapped version of your CD or track(s) meaning you can use it for that project but nothing else. That's what was done on my 2 pro-mastered projects.

For things like authoring and format conversion I don't mess around meaning $100 is reasonable if you're going to keep releasing music and you need it to just work. TBH it's worth it for the text and correct inter-song breaks etc. alone...I feel the same with Adobe's Media Encoder - I hate Adobe and their subscription model but that app has saved my rear so many times, particularly with weird video formats.

 

[Jefus]

I thought about HOFA, and to be fair, especially given the price of other plugins I'm running, it's not an outrageous price. The project (so far) was to burn our 3-track demo to some CDs to give to the band and some friends. So even the band didn't know I was burning it! I bought blank CDs that are white and had a couple of stamps made; one for the logo and one for the QR code for our Linktree. They came out well enough for what they are.

If we finish a full length I'd love to do it right with album artwork and sleeves and all, but this was just for fun. Most people looked at the CD and wondered what to do with it. They probably scanned the QR code and listened on YouTube or soundcloud

 

[MoireBass]

I use the Nero suite of apps, currently using the 2016 version on Win10-64. It's vast overkill for what you wanted but it's only $50.

The CD/DVD/Blu-Ray burning part is called Nero Burning ROM (ROM in German is pronounced like 'Rome' is in English) and I use both it and ImgBurn, each has features the other doesn't. Burning ROM also makes it very easy to assemble CD compilations, converts MP3s to PCM format, encodes song titles for display, has some audio filters like declick, hiss reduction, normalization, etc.

Nero Video enables frame-accurate editing of videos and movies in a lot of formats, a deep program with a lot of capabilities. There's also four or five other programs in the Nero suite that I haven't used. It has an app that recovers files from scratched CDs so you can burn a replacement. Only used it once and it worked fine.

Nero has a downloadable freeware program that makes it easy to create covers for CDs/DVDs/Blu-Rays and a freeware audio wave editor.