Another small update to Prometheus yesterday and today.
The recent remastering of Arcangel was different to before as I may now require hi-res versions of the files. In the early days I'd render the files in 16-bit (not even dithered) and those would be the final waves. Since April 2017, I've rendered in 32-bit, and transitioned to using the beloved (but unsupported for years) Sony CD Architect to master a CD, then extracting it's beautifully mastered 16-bit output to form the final waves. But, as a CD software, it can only output 16-bit, not 24 or 32.
One day I may have to use Prometheus so that I can export in 32-bit, at least it has dithering and good quality output now. The 64-bit update also makes it easy to load an entire album of tracks, so I can use it for mastering; but for CD mastering tracks should be divisible by CD timecode frames, that is by multiples of 1/75th sec, 588 samples. One step to helping with this is a new feature to extend a rendered wav to that multiple by adding blank space to the end of a file. This means that separate tracks would be identical whether rendered, or burned and extracted from a CD. Without this feature, the lengths would be a little different. This little feature was harder work to code than you might imagine.
For mastering an entire album though I'd still have to render the whole thing as one big wav, then chop it up, ensuring division by 588 samples, I may have to do that by hand and calculator (possible, if tedious). If I wanted to blend and segue tracks, which I often love to do, it may help to program special features to export sections of a song while starting and ending at those frame boundaries.
On other news, Deborah visited Vinyl Exchange in Manchester yesterday and they agreed to stock a few copies of Letters From A Square Spoon, out first ever CD in a record shop, which of course filled us with delight.
