On the SPLITTER bus, I create two Sends: One to MASTER FX, and the other to ORIGINAL. The other three buses are named MASTER FX, MASTERED, and ORIGINAL. (The Ctrl- key creates a “quick group” documented here.) All highlight tracks will set their Output the same way. Then hold down the Ctrl key, and set the Output of one of the tracks to SPLITTER. The first is named SPLITTER, and I need to set all of the imported audio tracks to direct their output to this bus: Cakewalk will create a separate audio track for each of the CD tracks. I open a new empty project, and import the audio tracks from the CD. This will require obtaining a loudness measurement from both signal paths. So, the plan is to temporarily reduce the volume of the mastering effect chain during the tweaking so that the measured loudness is the same. The original CD from 1986 is mastered at a fairly low average level. And that’s a problem, because one of the things I will be doing is raising the overall level of the music. This is because our ears think “louder” = “better”. When evaluating quality changes of audio, it is important to match effective loudness between the two.

I also want to be able easily to switch back and forth between “effected” and “un-effected” versions, for comparison purposes. The Planīecause this is a “re-master” and not a “master”, I’m going to treat all tracks the same way, using a common FX stack. What to do? I still have the original CD release from 1986, fortunately. It was “remastered” back in 2001 when the Loudness Wars were in full swing, and the results were… over-compressed and also shrill. Also: it was the Age of Digital Recording, and CDs were new, and when Treble wasn’t something you required analog psycho-trickery to extract from magnetic tape. I have a commercial CD release from 1986 that sounds horrible for several reasons: it was the Age of Digital Reverb and there’s too much of it. Here’s how I constructed a project in Cakewalk to re-master a commercial CD. There’s more than one way to skin a cat, and other folks have talked about this before.

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