Track Splitting and Editing Tutorial

This tutorial is designed to be interactive. You will need to download a short demonstration file in order to practice the techniques described below.

At various points you will see a symbol. Follow the instructions at these points to practice the techniques described.

• Overview of Track Splitting
• Track View
  • Exercise 1. Navigating Track Boundaries
• Editing Track Boundaries
  • Exercise 2. Moving a Track Boundary
• Adding Fades and Silence
  • Exercise 3. Adding Fades and Silence
• Selecting Tracks
  • Exercise 4. Navigating Tracks
• Playing Tracks
  • Exercise 5. Playing Tracks
• Re-Scanning for Tracks
  • Exercise 6. Scanning for Track Boundaries
• Manually Adding and Removing Tracks
  • Exercise 7. Adding and Removing Track Boundaries
• Cueing Tracks
  • Exercise 8. Cueing Track Boundaries
• Adding Tags to your Tracks
  • Exercise 9. Adding Tags to Tracks
• Saving and Naming Files
  • Exercise 10. Using Tags for File Naming
• Using Command Line Encoders
  • Lossy Compression Encoders
  • Lossless Compression Encoders

Overview of Track Splitting

Usually when you record an album you will want to split it into separate track files. This will enable your CD player or your music library software to go to a particular track when requested to do so.

Splitting tracks for CD burning is complicated by the fact that audio CD's are laid down in packets of 588 samples. Each packet contains one 75^th of a second of audio. Therefore when you create your individual track files, they should consist of an exact integer multiple of 588 samples. If this condition is not met, then the CD burner will need to truncate the file or pad it out with silence. In either case, this may cause an undesirable glitch at the end of a track.

The red book standard for audio CD's stipulates a 2 second silent lead-in to each track. If you burn your CD's to this standard (the default for most CD burners), you will probably want to cut out some of the silence between the tracks on your vinyl or cassette sources. Otherwise, the gap between tracks will be extended by the extra 2 seconds and will probably sound too long.

Sometimes however, you will want to produce tracks that play seamlessly from one to the next. To do this, most CD burning packages have a 'Disc-at-Once' mode. In this mode, the tracks follow on from each other without any gap. If you use this mode, it is essential that you do not remove any of the waveform between tracks. Otherwise, when the tracks are put back together on the CD, there could be glitches at the track transition points.

You may also want to add fade-in or fade-out to your tracks to make them sound more professional. Wave Corrector's track management functions ensure you can create your tracks with confidence that your tracks will sound just the way you planned them.

Track View

Track editing in Wave Corrector is done in Track View. This view is illustrated below. Wave Corrector switches automatically to Track View when you select a track boundary. To practice using this view, you will need the sample file demo3.ape. If you have not already done so, download the file at the following link: demo3.ape. Right click on the link and select the option 'Save Target As...'

Editing Track Boundaries

Once loaded in, Wave Corrector allows you to easily step between tracks and to audition the effect of any edits you make.

Exercise 2. Moving a Track Boundary The Next Track Marker and Previous Track Marker toolbar buttons allow you to quickly step between to step between all your track boundary markers.   At each boundary use the Audition Track Boundary toolbar button to decide whether the boundary is correctly placed.   Previous and Next Boundary Marker Audition Track Boundary At the centre of the Main Window, a vertical white line represents the selected boundary. As you move the mouse over the white line, the mouse pointer changes to East-West arrows. When the East-West arrows are showing, hold down the left mouse button and drag the boundary to a new position. Audition the effect of the change with the Audition Track Boundary toolbar button as described above. When you're satisfied that the position is correct, click the Apply button:

Adding Fades and Silence

As well as editing the position of boundaries, you can also add a fade-in or fade-out sections and you can also add a period of silence to the begging or end of a track.

Exercise 3. Adding Fades and Silence At the top of the Main Window, a yellow bar represents the area where you can apply a fade. Initially the fade bar is rectangular indicating that the fade period is zero. As you move the mouse over the edge of the yellow bar, the mouse pointer changes to East-West arrows.   When the East-West arrows are showing, hold down the left mouse button and drag the mouse into the yellow area. The yellow bar become triangulated to represent the fade period. Release the left mouse button when the desired position is reached. Audition the effect of the change with the Audition Track Boundary toolbar button as described above.   To add silence to the beginning of the track, move the mouse back to the centre point of the bar and holding the left mouse button down, drag away from the yellow area. A red cross hatched rectangle is generated to represent the length of the silence to be added.silent

Selecting Tracks

Once a file has been split into two or more tracks, Wave Corrector allows you to select individual tracks for playing. Alternatively, you can select the entire file and play that.

Playing Tracks

Re-Scanning for Tracks

Sometimes, the program will fail to find the correct track boundaries. This can happen, for example if there is a very quiet section within a track. This can be mistaken for a track boundary. In this case, you can give the program a target number of tracks to find. This will increase the likelihood that the correct boundaries will be found.

Exercise 6. Scanning for Track Boundaries To give the program a target number of tracks to find, use the command, Rescan tracks on the Waveform menu. Use the command with the file demo3.ape. Select User-Assisted and set a target of 2. This will cause the program to split the file into two tracks (instead of the correct 3). To restore the correct number of tracks, run the Rescan Tracks command again and this time, enter '3' as the target. The correct boundaries will now be restored.

Manually Adding and Removing Tracks

Wave Corrector has two commands, Merge Tracks and Split Track that allow you to remove track markers that the program creates or to manually add new ones.

Exercise 7. Adding and Removing Track Boundaries To manually remove a track boundary, you first have to select it. For practice, select the Start of Track 2 boundary marker using the next marker and/or previous marker toolbar buttons. Then select the Merge Tracks toolbar button. Tracks 1 and 2 will be merged.   Similarly, you can split a track at any arbitrary point. Move to a point anywhere in the file and select the Split Track toolbar button:   New boundary markers will be inserted at the point you specified. You can also remove an entire group of boundary markers by marking a block that includes all the markers you want to delete. Mark a block by dragging in the Overview window while holding down the left mouse button: Then right-click in the main window to bring up the block context menu and select the command, Merge Tracks in Block. All the boundary markers within the block will be deleted.

Cueing Tracks

You can also cue track boundaries 'on the fly' during track playback.

Exercise 8. Cueing Track Boundaries To practice this, use the file demo3.ape and first make sure that all track boundary markers have been deleted. You can do this with the Re-Scan Tracks command on the Waveform menu. Select the option, Remove All. Now, start playing back the file using the Play From Start toolbar button:   Play From Start     When you get to a point where you want a track boundary marker, hit the TAB key. A cue marker will be inserted at this point. Continue doing this for all points where you want a track boundary. When you have finished, stop playback and select the command Cue Markers -> Tracks on the Tracks menu:   The file will be split at the point you specified.

Adding Tags to your Tracks

Track Tags are text labels that you associate with your tracks. In Wave Corrector you can add the following tags:

1. Title
2. Artist
3. Album
4. Genre

Tags can be used to generate file names when you save your work. In addition tags are automatically saved in .ogg files, .ape files and .ses session files.

Exercise 9. Adding Tags to Tracks In this exercise, we'll add title and artist tags to the three tracks of the demo3.ape file. Load the file back in with the default settings and select the Track Properties toolbar button. The Track Properties window is now displayed:   Notice that Album Title defaults to the file name 'demo3'. First we'll change the album title to something more meaningful, say, 'My First Digital Album'; and we'll enter a genre, say 'Popular'. To enter tags for the individual tracks, click the Edit button. Enter titles and artists for the three tracks and when you're finished click OK. You then see something like the following:   Leave the file loaded ready for the next exercise where you'll learn how to use the tags you've just entered for file naming.

Saving and Naming Files

Once you've processed and tagged your files, you're ready to save them.

Files can be saved in both compressed and uncompressed formats. Compressed formats are used to reduce the amount of disk space taken up by your files. As such, you should compressed formats if you intend to keep a music library on hard disk, or if you are archiving your recordings. If you are simply transferring your tracks to audio CD, then you should use the uncompressed (.wav) format.

Compressed formats themselves break down into two types:- lossless and lossy.

Lossless compression perfectly preserves the quality of your recordings. A wave file saved losslessly can be recovered with bit perfect precision. This type of compression therefore to be preferred for archiving.

Lossless compression however uses up a lot more disk space than lossy so if you are happy to accept a small decrease in quality you can achieve much greater compression ratios by using lossy compression such as ogg or mp3.

The track properties we assigned in the previous section ( title, artist, etc) can be used for naming your files. They can also be added as tag metadata to some file types. In the next exercise we'll learn how to name files using these tags.

Exercise 10. Using Tags for File Naming This exercise follows on from the previous one. With the previous file still loaded, select 'Save' from the File menu. You'll see the following screen: Note the File Naming Rule, 'INPUTcor#'. This generates the names listed in the text box below it.The rule is interpreted as follows: use the INPUT file name ( in this case 'demo3'and append the text 'cor' followed by the track number. Click on the symbol and select the rule, 'ALBUM\# - TITLE'; this means that the program will create a folder called ALBUM (in this case 'My First Digital Album' and place in it your three files # - TITLE; ie the file will be names will begin with their track number and be followed by a hyphen and their track title. Notice how the names in Output File Names box change to reflect the new rule. In the above examples, the words in upper case are called Tokens . Wave corrector recognises the following tokens: ALBUM Album Title TITLE Track Title ARTIST Track Artist GENRE Album Genre # Track Number  \ Folder (create new one if necessary) Keep the file demo3.ape open in Wave Corrector because we'll use it in the next exercise.

Using Command Line Encoders

Wave Corrector is compatible with all DOS based command line encoders. Our links page has links to all the encoders directly supported by Wave Corrector. A good place to download other encoders is the Rarewares website.

Wave Corrector will generate a command line for you based on the parameters you set in the External Encoder section of the Compression Settings window:


The following tables show the default command lines that Wave Corrector will automatically generate.

Lossy Compression Encoders

Lossless Compression Encoders

Installing Encoders

To find an encoder, follow its download link on our links page. Most downloads are in the form of zip archives. Unzip the archive and save the contents to a folder called "Encoders" on your C drive.

The next time you run Wave Corrector, it will discover any new encoders you have installed and they will appear as options when you save files.

If you already have encoders installed elsewhere on your computer, you can use Wave Corrector's External Encoders command on the File menu to make them available to Wave Corrector.

Run the External Encoders command and click the Add button. Under "Path to Encoder", select the Encoder file you wish to use and click "Open". If the encoder is one that Wave Corrector recognises, it will fill in default values for the command line and file extension; otherwise you will need to fill these in yourself.