If you are using a SCSI CD writer in conjunction with your DPS12 to make audio CD's, you will have no doubt discovered that, like Roland's VS880, you can't write CD's in real time while the mix is playing, you have to first create a stereo mix of your song, and burn that to the CD.

This means that you need to get your mix into two stereo tracks, including any effects that the FX units are generating, before you can get your work onto CD. And as you effectively have to bounce down to two tracks, you must have two free tracks to record the bounce onto, so you are limited to 10 tracks if you want your song to end up on CD.

While this may be a pain for some people, there are a number of workarounds. Firstly, if your song uses 12 or more tracks worth of audio, you can bounce tracks together to free up some spare tracks, then bounce the whole lot again for your final stereo mix (see the Track Bouncing tutorials for more info on bouncing).

Secondly, if you own a separate digital recorded or DAT machine, you can record the output of all twelve tracks playing from the DPS12, and then rerecord that back into the Deeps on a couple of new vtracks prior to writing the CD. This is obviously more practical if you use lossless digital transfers (ie, this probably won't work too well if you record into a minidisk player via the analog connections).

CD Preparation

For this first example, I'm going to assume that we have a simple mix of ten tracks, with a vocal reverb added by one FX unit, like so:

1: Drums Left
2: Drums Right
3: Bass
4: Ac. Guitar Left
5: Ac. Guitar Right
6: Synth Pad Left
7: Synth Pad Right
8: Vocal
9: Rhythm Guitar Left
10: Rhythm Guitar Right
11: empty
12: empty

The vocal is being sent via Aux Send A to FX Unit A set to a nice reverb. We need to hear the reverb, so the FX Return is configured as "2 Stereo Pairs" and thus the reverb from FX unit A comes back on inputs 3 and 4. Both of these need to be assigned as "Thru Mix" on the Assign page, and their respective input levels turned up. Finally, pan inputs three and four left and right respectively, so we get a stereo reverb.

Ok, our mix sounds nice - we need to get it all into tracks 11 and 12. The easiest way to do this is to bounce using the masters - we can actually tap the output of the whole mixer section and route that to the recorder section. Go to the Assign-->Source page, scroll down to tracks 11 and 12 and change their record source to "Master L" and "Master R" respectively. Now make sure the faders for 11 and 12 are turned fully down, or you will get feedback. Go to the control panel and scroll to the Play Monitor page and make sure it is set to "Rec Source" so we can monitor our input levels in play mode.

Now, record enable tracks 11 and 12, and press play. Watch the meters for tracks 11 and 12 and make sure you don't clip. You can control the mix level with the master fader, so try and get the highest level you can without clipping. Now record the entire song to tracks 11 and 12.

When the song has finished, record mute tracks 11 and 12 and press Main-->CD-R to get to the CDR screen. Select tracks 11 and 12 as the tracks you want to write to CD, select "FAST" and "Test:Off", and press write, and your song is written to the CD. If you want to add more songs to the CD, go back and follow the same procedure - load your new project, get the mix right, bounce to tracks 11 and 12 using the masters, and write the next track (the second song will automatically become track 2 on the CD, and so on).

When you're done writing tracks to the CD, press "Finish" to finalise the CD's table of contents and make it readable on an ordinary CD player.

Additional Tips

Don't forget that once you have your finished mix on two tracks, you still have some options open to you before you write them to a CD. In particular, you can EQ your mix, process it again with the internal FX, or even route it to an external FX unit or compressor to improve it some more. Don't forget though that whatever you do, you must rerecord any additional processing back to two stereo tracks before writing them to CD, as you can do it in real time. If you record this final mix onto a different pair of vtracks, you can still keep your unprocessed mix for safety.

If you are primarily burning audio CD's from the DPS12 (rather than a separate computer system), you'll probably want to get all the finished mixes for all of your songs into one project, as you won't have to constantly switch projects between each song.. All you would them do is select the pair of tracks for your first song, write them, select the next pair of tracks, write them, etc etc. Unfortunately the DPS12 doesn't have a function to copy audio between projects, so you'll probably need to use an external digital recorder or DAT machine to record the mix from one project and then reload it to the destination project.

If you don't have a separate digital recorder then all is not lost, as the CD-R screen features a "Project" button that lets you quickly switch projects without having to go to the project page.

Power CD Writing

If you really want to write large quantities of CD's you should move over to a computer/software-based approach, as burning an album track-by-track on the DPS12 is time consuming and error-prone (it's quite easy to select the wrong track sometimes!). You'll need a reasonably powerful computer with a SCSI interface, and some CD writing software (this usually comes bundled with the CDR drive when you buy it, and sometimes you get a SCSI card for your PC thrown in).

The first step is to get the final stereo mixes into your computer. If you have a soundcard with digital inputs then you can record the output of the DPS12 directly as a WAV file on the computer, and assemble the final CD from those. Or you can write each mix to a CD-R/CD-RW using the Deeps as normal, finalise it, and either pop the resultant audio CD into your computer's CD-ROM drive, or connect your CDR drive to the computer, and use the bundled software to extract the mixes from the audio CD into WAV files.

Once you have the mixes on your computer as WAV files, you can then use your CD writing software to burn them to CD in one go, in the order you specify, and in this way way you can burn whole albums in fifteen minutes or so, unsupervised. You can even use sample editors like Cool Edit, Sound Forge or Peak to edit your mixes, perform fades and level optimisation, and even process mixes through software plugins before they end up on CD.