Rickresource Rickenbacker Forum

The learning curve is starting to straighten out a bit. I'm starting to get the hang of all the compressors and other little digital gizzmos. But there's one real roadblock I can't seem to dismantle. How does one take for example 10 tracks and turn them into a stereo finished master?
I had to export stems (Presonusspeak for independent tracks, I guess) first into Audacity, track by track, make adjustments for clipping in Audacity, and finally I could save it as a stereo master.

Audacity can read .flac, .ogg, or .wav files which all work fine with Presonus. In trying to export the entire finished mix to Audacity, where it will be converted to .mp3, several tracks were lost. These missing tracks were still present in the original Audiobox window, and I could hear the mix from the Audiobox just fine. Except for converting the .ogg files to .mp3 this whole process is way too cumbersome. There has to be a simpler way. Please comment and advise.
JimK

Normally the procedure is to take the stems (tracks) from the source, load them into a digital audio workstation (DAW) like you've done with Audacity, and get your mix down in the DAW. Normally you'd bring across dry tracks and add plugins as necessary in the DAW. When you're happy with everything, you'd export the mix as a stereo file, typically a broadcast WAV or sometime as an AIFF file, which then goes to a mastering house, where the final CD master is created.

If you're self-mastering, you would have a software mastering plug-in on the final output bus, which you can tweak until you're happy with the overall sound. Then your final export, as above, would become your source for a single track CD or as input for conversion to ab MP3. Some DAWs can also output as an MP3 but you'll still want to have a full quality WAV or AIFF somewhere too.

If this is going to be a CD with multiple songs, and you're self-mastering, then you will also need one of the many programs to put together all the song files along with appropriate lead-ins, boiling it down to one single burnable audio file. I personally like Sony CD Architect for this but there's any number of choices and some are even free.

It appears like I stumbled onto the way things work. A bit clumsy and time consuming, I think. But it worked. As an aside, I really don't like the effects, reverb, etc. in Audacity. I prefer to use it to clean up any unwanted noises, drumstick clicks, hums, etc. Thanks for taking the time to respond, John.
JimK