This is a tutorial on how to make your own CD master that is a red book CD compliant. This standard ensure that your CD can be played with any CD player on the market. It can be a frustrating experience that you have burned a CD master and provide it to replicating plants only to find out it won’t play in your customers CD player or much worse in an FM station CD player. So make sure that if you are releasing an album in CD format, it should comply with the red book standard.
Minimum Requirements in CD master to comply Red Book standard
Below are the minimum requirements before you can proceed to creating a red book CD:
1.) Finished master of your album – this is the output of the audio mastering process. You should ask two copies from your mastering engineer:
a.) High resolution format of your album masters with you. It should be at least 24-bit/48KHz stereo.
b.) CD audio format (16-bit/44.1KHz stereo) – Most mastering engineers or facilities should provide this with you so that you do not need to do sample rate conversion and dithering by yourself. Or much better ask them if they can create a CD master of your album that is red book compliant, so that you won’t be doing this yourself.
In addition, your finished master should strictly adhere to the following technical specifications:
a.)Make sure that your album should not exceed 74 minutes playing time (including all pauses and silence since from the first track). Most albums released are around 45 minutes to 50 minutes in total length.
b.) The maximum number of tracks in the album should be less than 99.
c.) The minimum track duration is 4 seconds including a 2 second pause.
d.) Total usage space of tracks in the CD (including 2 second pause, etc) should not exceed 650 MB.
2.) You need a high quality blank CD media and CD writer.
3.) ISRC (International Standard Recording Code) – you should assign each of your track with ISRC. If you do not have an ISRC code, you need to apply. Read the following tutorials for details:
Frequently asked questions regarding ISRC
4.) A CD burning or CD authoring software capable of burning Red Book CD standard. There are lots of options, unfortunately no free software can do this. You cannot just use any CD burning software because not all of them have features that can be used to produce red book standard compliant CD.
One of the most affordable option is to use Sony CD Architect
5.) If you do not have the CD audio format of your master (only the high resolution 24-bit/48KHz or more provided by the mastering engineer), then you need to apply sample rate conversion and dithering. You can use Voxengo R8brain software to do this conversion (set to 44100, output bit depth to 16 and Quality set to Very High).
Do this first before inserting the tracks to your CD album project.
Optional: UPC/EAN bar code if you are releasing album commercially. Distributors and stores are needing a UPC bar code for tracking the album sales, etc. Without UPC bar code, you will have a hard time distributing your albums for sale in record stores.
Example – Creating CD master based on Red Book standard
In this tutorial, I will use Adobe Audition 1.5 which is also capable of producing red book CD. The following are the steps (for other CD authoring software refer to the manual for similar steps):
1.) Launch Adobe Audition.
2.) Go to CD Project View.
3.) Insert your album tracks in the project view. The CD authoring software should take of all red book specifications aspects by itself (e.g. the two second pause, etc). But keep an eye of all technical specifications discussed earlier to make sure they are not violated.
After adding all tracks in the CD album project (at your desired track sequence/arrangement), you should be able to see the total length and space to be used by the tracks in the CD, for example:
Project album size
Take note the length does not exceed 74 minutes maximum and it is less than 650MB in size that complies with Red book CD specifications.
4.) Insert ISRC on each tracks, select each track and go to its properties. Type the ISRC on it. ISRC should always be 12characters, so enter the entire 12 characters for each track. Also you can enable copy protection tag as supported by Red book CD specifications. Pre-emphasis is not needed. Two second pause is enabled by default. See screenshot below:
ISRC red book standard
Other information that you need to enter includes the UPC bar code.
5.) After you complete entering the details, you are now ready to burn the CD.Insert the CD-R blank CD (high quality blank disc) and burn using disc at once method at 4x speed.
6.) If your CD authoring software has a PQ sheet printout, then print it out. Or else you can manually create a PQ sheet but this can be difficult ; it is why its important to use a CD authoring software that is designed for red book specifications. You can read more about PQ sheet here.
7.) You can then provide the CD master and the PQ sheet to the replication plant.
Content last updated on July 23, 2012