Sony CD Architect

Creating a professional, high-quality audio CD requires some work on your part, but it’s not as difficult as it might look at a first glance. The Sony CD Architect is an application that can produce audio discs to Red Book specifications.

The program comes with a clean interface with various tools that can help you create the disc and optimize the tracks.

The songs can be mastered by applying dozens of DirectX effects and customized by trimming the track in just a few easy steps. The GUI comes with a button that can be enabled to apply an automatic crossfade effect. Also, muting areas of the songs and normalizing the sound levels is also possible.

You may edit the PQ codes, which are the start and stop markers for the CD player to read, in order to know where each track begins and end. At the same time, you can create complex crossfades and DJ-style megamixes.

Before burning the CD, managing the track list is required. You can create live-style discs and even hidden tracks. The CDs can be burned in disc-at-once mode.

Since the app strictly follows the Red Book standard for audio CDs, the discs have a maximum playing time and number of tracks, a minimum duration for a song and require an International Standard Recording Code (ISRC), which can be edited from the track list.

The bottom line is that Sony CD Architect is an advanced application that gives you the opportunity to create and burn professional discs. Inexperienced users might require some time to get accustomed to all the functions the program comes with.