DDP images support in KXStudio?

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Snap
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DDP images support in KXStudio?

Post by Snap »

Hey FalkTX. Did you ever considered including something like this in your Pack?

Attempt of discussion here.
Snap
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Re: DDP images support in KXStudio?

Post by Snap »

Ok, I see... I use WaveEditor on Mac (now mutated into Triumph). Wish there were a better solution for Linux. It's somewhat frustrating keeping the three OSs just to run the final steps of the projects. Samplitude on Win for the final CD indexing and often for final mastering processing too, plus Wave Editor on Mac for the DDP images. I'm not a mastering engineer, but often I'm requested to do a masting for bands that cannot afford a pro mastering or not bothering too much about it.
ToddMWorth
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Re: DDP images support in KXStudio?

Post by ToddMWorth »

I've never heard of DDP before and honestly I don't see what it provides that could not be achieved with an ISO and an MD5 sum... aside from proprietary lock-in.
Snap
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Re: DDP images support in KXStudio?

Post by Snap »

It's an standard format for final master delivering to CD factories. Commonly via FPT servers. Not all CD printer companies accept Jam or other formats (think of JAMin). Some of them plainly reject whatever not being a DDP in advance. This ensures accuracy... somewhat.

I learnt it the hard way. When a band or a small label order small quantities of CDs, it's not always easy getting a test print beforehand printing the whole stuff. When they not accept I always recommend my customers to go to another plant, but budget not always allows bands or labels affording a second more reliable option. A few years back I sent a DDP to a factory. By the time I never asked for a test print. We got a pile of CDs sounding clearly different than the original files. Not a small difference... even my old mother noticed it instantly. I went to the factory they showed that the check sum was perfectly right. They made me listen and compare my original files with the printed CDs in one of their... ahem... studio rooms. What a crap and wrongly conceived listening room! Of course they said they both sounded exactly the same. I just drove crazy. It was too evident. Even in blind tests we did there, there was no way to be confused.... The result was we had to eat up de CDs. No money back. Nothing. Nil. Of course I never sent anyone there again to print their albums.

So better always send DDPs and double check the test prints if you have the chance.
calimerox
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Re: DDP images support in KXStudio?

Post by calimerox »

i have that problem exactly right now. I have a small premaster job and they dont want anything but a ddp.

there s a commandline tool called "DDP Mastering Tools for the Command Line"

and i dont really get the syntax how to use it, maybe someone can help me out here?

I usually export via ardour / mixbus and get a .cue and a .wav file. how can i convert these into ddp????

thanks! :)
ToddMWorth
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Re: DDP images support in KXStudio?

Post by ToddMWorth »

I think you'll find it's easier to get a mastering house to support a standard that has existed and been widely used and accepted for decades (ISO and a hash like an MD5 or SHA1 or whatever), than to get open-source support for proprietary stuff that hardly anyone wants and is obsoleted by the aforementioned standards.

Have you tried looking at a different mastering house? Or asking your current spot to accept ISO and use an MD5 sum?
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Re: DDP images support in KXStudio?

Post by i2productions »

I only ever use the major distribution mediums to do CDs like cdbaby and I've used a few over the years. Never had any problems giving an ISO, a pre-master cd, or even just uploading .wav. I've heard of what u r talking about, but never had the need to use it, and never had a bad run of disks. On top of the fact CDs are dying. I'm one of the few people that still goes out of ky way to buy a physical disk. But let's put it this way. The last local band on my label sold 37 physical albums the first year. In that time they sold 72 albums online and 842 single. Don't really see the point in extra media that likely won't survive another 5 years.
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Re: DDP images support in KXStudio?

Post by GraysonPeddie »

I do buy CDs and rip the audio tracks to FLAC in Linux instead of buying MP3s in digital format regardless of whether or not the songs in an album gets overly compressed, clipped, and limited just to make music sound very louder in order to compete with commercial music tracks.

But then, louder isn't always better, as I would rather preserve musicality and get the most out of my good quality speakers or studio headphones.

And when it comes to mastering after the mixing phase, I'd rather take control of my music rather than sending my songs to the mastering house. I don't really care much about competing with commercial music tracks, so compression and limiting during the mastering phase is not my thing. I'd let a listener turn up their volume and not me. No loudness war for me.
--Grayson Peddie

Music Interest: New Age w/ a mix of modern smooth jazz, light techno/trance & downtempo -- something Epcot Future World/Tomorrowland-flavored.
calimerox
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Re: DDP images support in KXStudio?

Post by calimerox »

Well, in my case I m stuck with the ddp cause it s just a job and I have to deliver the material to a certain cd pressing factory that ONLY accepts ddps. it s somewhat annoying i know but thats the fact, one solution i found and i m working on right now:

http://ddp.andreasruge.de/cue2ddp.html

like the first post mentioned, it s all in there and you can just install it... somehow it makes me strange cd names right now but not sure if they were already strange in my .cue file..


concerts your .cue / + wav file to a ddp file with a checksum etc.. i m also new to this premaster stuff, but this seems to be the standard..
by the way, how can you make an .iso of an audio cd in linux? isnt that jsut for data / videos etc?
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Re: DDP images support in KXStudio?

Post by i2productions »

calimerox wrote: by the way, how can you make an .iso of an audio cd in linux? isnt that jsut for data / videos etc?
I have never made an audio iso in linux. Haven't made one in over 6 years, and then it was in Windows. But, yes, some cd authoring programs do offer to make an iso.

I just did some searching. As I've never had the need for it, I've never researched ddp. Now I understand. I've never had anything printed that was more than a run of 100 at a time, and have only ever utilized duplication. After doing some reading, I can see how, if you were going for MASS production and replication vs duplication, why this format is somewhat superior. Though I think it's still overcomplicating a job by making a final product CD 100% to spec vs 99.9+% with a standard format. If I were ever to have a band that I was ordering 10,000+ runs of albums, I would want to know 100% that all is well.
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Re: DDP images support in KXStudio?

Post by ToddMWorth »

calimerox wrote: by the way, how can you make an .iso of an audio cd in linux? isnt that jsut for data / videos etc?
Yeh, sorry for the slang.... I tend to call any optical device image an "ISO", but that's not always accurate. Have a google around, there are a few formats... BIN being common.
anrug
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Re: DDP images support in KXStudio?

Post by anrug »

Hello everybody, just wanted to introduce myself, I'm a recording producer in the classical music field and a software developer living in Germany. And since I'm the author of the DDP tools mentioned earlier in this thread, I hope I can help answer some of the question.
falkTX wrote:afaik those tools have licensing issues so source code is not available.
I bet distribution of those binaries is limited as well.
Yepp, no source code available, sorry. I've been writing the code straight to the spec, which I licensed from DCA, Inc. (it's free of charge). Of course some reverse engineering was needed as well to complete the information given. But it wasn't a clean room approach. I've tried getting DCA's blessing for an open source implementation, but I'm sorry to inform you, that my impression is, they don't even know how FLOSS licenses work.

Still the good news is, there are no licensing fees and I'm allowed to distribute binaries without further restrictions.
ToddMWorth wrote:I've never heard of DDP before and honestly I don't see what it provides that could not be achieved with an ISO and an MD5 sum... aside from proprietary lock-in.
You mentioned already that ISO is a CD-ROM image format not one for CD audio. But aside from that, the problem simply is, that many plants accept very few image formats aside from DDP. Technically there is not really a reason for that, Nero, Pyramix or Samplitue images would work as well, JAM, cue/wav, toc/wav would have some minor limitations but would work also. Maybe since plants usually use DDP internally anyway, accepting other format would add the trouble of reliable conversion first.
Snap wrote:A few years back I sent a DDP to a factory. By the time I never asked for a test print. We got a pile of CDs sounding clearly different than the original files. Not a small difference... even my old mother noticed it instantly. I went to the factory they showed that the check sum was perfectly right. They made me listen and compare my original files with the printed CDs in one of their... ahem... studio rooms. What a crap and wrongly conceived listening room! Of course they said they both sounded exactly the same. I just drove crazy. It was too evident. Even in blind tests we did there, there was no way to be confused.... The result was we had to eat up de CDs. No money back. Nothing. Nil. Of course I never sent anyone there again to print their albums.

So better always send DDPs and double check the test prints if you have the chance.
Wow, that's a sad story. :( I guess I've been lucky so far. I've never had the chance to get a test print, since I usually send my DDP masters out to the labels who were contracting me, and they deal with the plant directly. But in recent years I've usually ripped some of the pressed CDs I get and compared them to my original DDPs. Aside from the unavoidable offset, they have always been identical up to te bit level.
i2productions wrote:Though I think it's still overcomplicating a job by making a final product CD 100% to spec vs 99.9+% with a standard format. If I were ever to have a band that I was ordering 10,000+ runs of albums, I would want to know 100% that all is well.
What exactly do you mean by "99.9+%" and by "standard format"? The question whether a CD is up to spec (Red Book in this case) is not directly related to the image format used. All image formats I've seen theorectically allow describing CDs, which are not Red Book compatible. It's the software used or sometimes unfortunately the user who must make sure the master is up to the Red Book.

Finally let me say, I'm sorry I can't offer a GUI for cue2ddp at the moment. The reason is mainly time constraints. My primary focus is on having cue2ddp work absolutey reliable, because that's crucial in mastering. And what cue2ddp does is extremely simple, just a format conversion from cue/wav or cue/bin to DDP. A GUI would not add much I believe. Or, to be more precise, with a GUI I'd also expect comfortable editing of CD text, playback of cue/wav as well as DDP, simple fades and arranging tracks, burning of both formats, and creating both formats from an existing CD, and then FTP integrated. Putting all that together without being able to use FLOSS libraries is really not what I'm inclined to do at the moment. (And as you probably have noticed this type of product has been created in the meantime by dutch company Sonoris, and the price tag is quite competetive -- for Linux and FLOSS that doesn't help of course.)

My goal was to make DDP creation possible and affordable in Linux, and for now that's accomplished I think. Cue2ddp is reliable I'd say, I'll remove the "alpha" tag with the next release. I haven't seen any serious issues for quite some time. But then the interest in the software is generally quite low of course. Of course I'd be happy to see this format natively supported by software like Ardour or GnomeCDMaster (the most complete PQ editing software for Linux I believe). If anybody has constructive ideas on how to integrate this non-free package I'm happy to hear them. Unfortunately there is no plug-in API for CD audio export. ;)
anrug
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Re: DDP images support in KXStudio?

Post by anrug »

falkTX wrote:But are others allowed to redistribute your binaries?
I think so. I hold the copyright on the software (in Germany you the copyright can't be transferred anyway), and if I allow redistribution it should be OK.
falkTX wrote:I want to have your tools in the non-free repo, even maybe the default install, but I'm afraid of the license issues that brings.
Aren't you the only one allowed to distribute those binaries?

I would appreciate some more info about this.
This is the license agreement: http://www.dcainc.com/support/documenta ... 111005.pdf. It's good if you as a native speaker read that stuff. The main part is probably:
Upon the terms and conditions set forth herein, DCA hereby grants to
the Licensee a limited, non-exclusive License to make use of the Licensed Material in order to create
products in the proper format for further processing (“Licensee Products”). The license does not grant
any rights to the Licensee to transfer or further distribute the Licensed Specification in any way
other than in the creation of Licensee Products.
The phrase to create products in the proper format for further processing almost sounds like they were not referring to software as a product but a DDP image itself, which wouldn't make too much sense to me. Anyway, let me know what you think.

(After all these years, I almost think signing this license was a mistake and somebody other than me should just do a clean room reverse engineering. Using the XLD and dvdtape sources together with my cue2dpp binary that would not be much work at all. And then I would simply file bugs, and we'd have got a small FLOSS library. But maybe CD time is over anyway?)
anrug
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Re: DDP images support in KXStudio?

Post by anrug »

falkTX wrote:do you allow me to put your ddp tools in the KXStudio non-free repo, AND the upcoming Live-DVDs? (pre-installed)
Yes, I'll certainly allow that. Since I'm working an a new release (only minor issues) right now, we should probably talk about the details, time-frame etc. then. I have not really learned how to package for Debian or RPM. But the code has no dependencies other than libc I guess, just plain good old standard C.

BTW, any observation while reading the DDP license?
ToddMWorth
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Re: DDP images support in KXStudio?

Post by ToddMWorth »

My 2c (and I say this with full awareness and respect that this is falk's baby, and what he says, goes!) is that I'm anti the inclusion of the software. I think that using it is supporting proprietary lock-in, and has no benefit other than to prolong the life of the format. Honestly, the whole thing seems contrary to all of the reasons I like to use open source software based on open standards.

I could be wrong... but I'm yet to hear anything to suggest that I am. I'm open minded to an education, if there's anything new to add?
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