I am involved in an audio recording project and I need some quick advice. Let me say at the outset that I have tried the Sony email support option without success. We are talking back and forth on two different levels.

First a description of the project. This past summer I was part of a team that documented our church choir on a performance tour of the UK, and I am now the "audio engineer" tasked with producing a CD that contains the best performances of each piece selected from one of five different concert venues each with their own acoustic characteristics. The gear we used was a Sound Devices 702T with two Shure KSM-141 mics in an X-Y configuration. The recordings are 24bit 88.2kHz.

I have mastered the basics (and I do mean the basics) of Sound Forge 9 and the Waves Z-Noise filter, but I am at an impasse in regards to how to do several things. So far I have accomplished the following in regards to the raw audio.
Balanced audio between channels for poor microphone placement when required for a performance recording.

Compensated for the variation in dynamic levels for different concerts by selecting one a cappella piece in one concert as the reference and adjusting the dynamic level (gain) of the recording at the other venues to match the reference.

Added reverb to one very dry location so that the songs selected from that performance recording would more closely match those in large cathedrals.

Minimized noise through out each recording with Z-Noise by creating a separate ambient noise profile for that performance venue. With all of that done, the audio is clean, robust, smooth and often brilliantly tranlucent with good stereo imaging. In Sound Forge, I have created regions for each of the songs that have been selected for inclusion on the final CD. My goal is to create a master file which will be exported to the CD Architect 5 software for burning the master CD. When I posed my dilemma to Sony's Sound Forge support, this is what I in return was less than satisfactory:

Thank you for contacting Sony Creative Software.

Here are a couple of things attached that might help.The screen shot is pointing out where to click in CD Architect to apply effects. If you have an effects chain setup and want to apply that to multiple events, you could maybe use CD Architect rather than Sound Forge to accomplish this. I have developed several different possible methodologies.

Methodology 1

[list:a4d032461f]Copy one version of a song from one of the recordings of five different concerts that to which the following have been accomplished:

[list:a4d032461f]Balanced between tracks corrected if necessary because of poor Microphone placement.

Gain adjusted up or down to match dynamic levels of other concert venues.

Noise reduced with Z-Noise plugin .Paste song into a new project keeping all of the adjustments made in a.i. through a.iii above.

Burn master CD from new project.

Save the new project as a new composite master WAV file that retains all of the modifications and adjustments without an auxiliary metADATa file. [/list:u:a4d032461f][/list:u:a4d032461f]

-- OR –-

Methodology 2

[list:a4d032461f]Export one version of a song from one of the recordings of five different concerts into CD Architect while retaining all of the adjustments made in Sound Forge including:

[list:a4d032461f]Balanced between tracks corrected if necessary because of poor Microphone placement.

Gain adjusted up or down to match dynamic levels of other concert venues.

Noise reduced with Z-Noise plugin .
Burn master CD in CD Architect. [/list:u:a4d032461f][/list:u:a4d032461f]

-- OR --

Methodology 3

[list:a4d032461f]Copy one version of a song from one of the recordings of five different concerts to which the following have been accomplished:

[list:a4d032461f]Balanced between tracks corrected if necessary because of poor microphone placement.

Gain adjusted up or down to match dynamic levels of other concert venues.

Noise reduced with Z-Noise plugin .
Paste song into a new project keeping all of the adjustments made in a.i. through a.iii above.

Save new project as a WAV file that would be regarded as destructive because the original audio has been modified. In other words, if the new file is played back by something other than Sound Forge, the same noise reduction, dynamic modification, and channel balance would be apparent as if each song was played through Sound Forge from the original raw audio as modified in a.1. through a.iii. above.

Burn master CD from newly created file. [/list:u:a4d032461f][/list:u:a4d032461f]

Frankly, methodology 2 is the least preferable solution. With either methodology 1 or 2, the master file created will have all of the modifications and could be played as. It would be a standalone that did not require Sound Forge or CD Architect to be running to obtain the dynamic, noise, etc. adjustments. Conceptually, at my current level of understanding, the simplest way to accomplish what I want is to create a master project in Sound Forge, copy and paste the selected pieces from the set of five concert recordings retaining all of the individual metADATa for each selection, and then both importing the master project file into CD Architect for burning the disc and saving the master project as a modified WAV file which, when played on something like iTunes or Windows Media Player would still have all of the editing in terms of noise reduction etc. of the individual songs. Problem is that I have not found a way to either export a selection to CD Architect retaining all of the changes and/or save a master project as an edited WAV file that retains all of the file modifications.

Regards,

Bob Wilson