Cd Spin Doctor

[dan McCarter]

I recently updated to Toast 11 for the MAC and I mostly use CD Spin Doctor for managing music. I find the new Spin Doctor totally unfamiliar, and when I click on help there is no documentation. Is there any documentation available on line or am I missing something.

Thanks

Dan

[dan McCarter]

Since posting this earlier today I have managed to crash Spin doctor each time I use it. I have a downloaded recording of some very old songs from the internet. There is 16 in the recording. Each time I auto define the pieces I get a different number of songs.

1) There seems to be no manual way to do this even thought in preferences there is a =manual, analog and a digital option.

2. Once a song is defined the program shows the beginning time and the ending time but the duration time is totally inaccurate

3) when I auto defines I got a listing of 16 songs but the numbering of them started out from the top as 18, blank then 2 ,3 etc. To verify which song was number 18 i clicked play and it was of course song number 1. I then tried to play song number 2 which was shown as blank but I received a loud static sound from my speakers and command.option.escape shows Spin doctor is no longer responding.

Unfortunately I deleted version 10 so I am officially out of business until Roxio puts out a new version!!!

[tsantee]

If you don't still have the Toast 10 installer you can download it from the Roxio Software Updates page. It includes CD Spin Doctor. Note that you have to launch Toast 10 before launching CD Spin Doctor for the first time.

 

Spin Doctor crashed for me when I had some Bias plugins in my Mac's Library>Audio>VST>Plugins folder. But that caused a crash preventing Spin Doctor from creating a waveform and you obviously got to that stage.

 

The Manual, Analog and Digital preference sets the default for the gaps and sensitivity that Spin Doctor uses in automatically marking tracks. In this case Manual means you are adjusting those sliders in the preferences to your own settings rather than the defaults for analog or digital sources. It is unrelated to manually marking tracks.

 

Similar to previous versions, you manually mark tracks by clicking on a non-marked portion of the wave form and dragging to the point you want it to end. You cannot drag over an existing track marker. When manually marking tracks when there are no existing tracks the first marker you create is named "Untitled Track" without any digits and successive tracks add two digits to that name beginning with "Untitled Track 02." If you later mark a track in an unselected area that between two other marked tracks the track will be added to the list in the correct location but the number will appear out of sequence.

 

To remove a marked track (especially when you want to manually mark tracks and the entire waveform was auto-defined as a single track) just select the track in the list and click the delete key. I needed to do that because auto define failed to see any individual tracks in an album I captured that was playing in iTunes.

 

There are handles at the start and end of tracks for fine-tuning their placement. You need to use the slider below the waveform to zoom in. I also expand to full screen by clicking the third button where the window display buttons are located.

 

You are correct that the Track Duration info is bogus. So far I haven't had Identify work for the tracks I captured so I don't know if that isn't working or I recorded music that isn't identifiable that way.

 

Double clicking on a track title starts playback at the start of the track. However, the playhead may not move when doing this until you press the space bar to stop playback. Double clicking on the waveform moves the playhead to that point.

 

Entering new info for tracks isn't as easy as it should be. You can select all the tracks to enter information common among all the tracks. Then you need to enter each track name individually and there is no keyboard way to advance to the next track. So you have to use your mouse to select the next one and so on. The Genre entry doesn't have the pop-up choices we're accustomed to seeing. As a result, you may want to do the entering of some info in iTunes or other application after exporting it. In fact, most of the fields won't retain anything you enter. The only ones working for me are Artist, Album Artist and the Track number boxes. I was finally able to get a track titled with a real name but it caused that field to be inaccessible again for that track or any other. Let's say that part of the application is unfinished.

 

I chose to export 6 tracks to Toast. At first I thought nothing was happening when I clicked okay. The spinning ball eventually appeared while Spin Doctor wrote the individual tracks to the hard drive before they opened in Toast. There should be some information provided such as "processing" or "please wait" so it doesn't look something had gone wrong. When the tracks arrived in Toast the album was retitled SpinDoctor Imports. If I had been allowed to enter an album name it might have carried over since it did carry over my one edited track title. In Toast I used the Get Track Info... window in the Disc menu to enter the album/artist/track info. The tracks appear in Toast's audio CD window. There is no way for them to automatically appear in the Convert window.

 

Selecting Export as file from the Options button next to a track presents a window with a list of export formats. However, there is no way to export all the tracks at once except to send them to iTunes or Toast. It also doesn't work to drag the tracks to the desktop as an export alternative as it did with earlier versions. In fact, it isn't possible to save the Spin Doctor project to work on later. If you don't choose Save before quitting Spin Doctor you lose everything that was recorded. Choosing Save just gets you a file you can open but without any of the work you might have done in marking tracks. The default format that Spin Doctor selects when choosing Save is not a good choice. I suggest selecting AIFF and changing the Data Format to 16 bit. Of course, this doesn't matter if you already sent your project to Toast or iTunes.

 

At this point I think it may be best to use the previous Spin Doctor. If you like the way this one captures from selected applications (it's a feature I like) then capture with this version and save as a 16-bit AIFF file and open that in the previous version to finish your track work.

[dan McCarter]

THANKS for the information

In previous versions of Cd Spin doctor when you opened a file a wave for appeared an you could either use the automatic or manual way of marking tracks. It doesn't do that anymore and clicking manual in the preference box doesn't do anything until you click on the icon to seperate the tracks then you get some tracks colored and some not colored.

But your information helps

Dan

If you don't still have the Toast 10 installer you can download it from the Roxio Software Updates page. It includes CD Spin Doctor. Note that you have to launch Toast 10 before launching CD Spin Doctor for the first time.

 

Spin Doctor crashed for me when I had some Bias plugins in my Mac's Library>Audio>VST>Plugins folder. But that caused a crash preventing Spin Doctor from creating a waveform and you obviously got to that stage.

 

The Manual, Analog and Digital preference sets the default for the gaps and sensitivity that Spin Doctor uses in automatically marking tracks. In this case Manual means you are adjusting those sliders in the preferences to your own settings rather than the defaults for analog or digital sources. It is unrelated to manually marking tracks.

 

Similar to previous versions, you manually mark tracks by clicking on a non-marked portion of the wave form and dragging to the point you want it to end. You cannot drag over an existing track marker. When manually marking tracks when there are no existing tracks the first marker you create is named "Untitled Track" without any digits and successive tracks add two digits to that name beginning with "Untitled Track 02." If you later mark a track in an unselected area that between two other marked tracks the track will be added to the list in the correct location but the number will appear out of sequence.

 

To remove a marked track (especially when you want to manually mark tracks and the entire waveform was auto-defined as a single track) just select the track in the list and click the delete key. I needed to do that because auto define failed to see any individual tracks in an album I captured that was playing in iTunes.

 

There are handles at the start and end of tracks for fine-tuning their placement. You need to use the slider below the waveform to zoom in. I also expand to full screen by clicking the third button where the window display buttons are located.

 

You are correct that the Track Duration info is bogus. So far I haven't had Identify work for the tracks I captured so I don't know if that isn't working or I recorded music that isn't identifiable that way.

 

Double clicking on a track title starts playback at the start of the track. However, the playhead may not move when doing this until you press the space bar to stop playback. Double clicking on the waveform moves the playhead to that point.

 

Entering new info for tracks isn't as easy as it should be. You can select all the tracks to enter information common among all the tracks. Then you need to enter each track name individually and there is no keyboard way to advance to the next track. So you have to use your mouse to select the next one and so on. The Genre entry doesn't have the pop-up choices we're accustomed to seeing. As a result, you may want to do the entering of some info in iTunes or other application after exporting it. In fact, most of the fields won't retain anything you enter. The only ones working for me are Artist, Album Artist and the Track number boxes. I was finally able to get a track titled with a real name but it caused that field to be inaccessible again for that track or any other. Let's say that part of the application is unfinished.

 

I chose to export 6 tracks to Toast. At first I thought nothing was happening when I clicked okay. The spinning ball eventually appeared while Spin Doctor wrote the individual tracks to the hard drive before they opened in Toast. There should be some information provided such as "processing" or "please wait" so it doesn't look something had gone wrong. When the tracks arrived in Toast the album was retitled SpinDoctor Imports. If I had been allowed to enter an album name it might have carried over since it did carry over my one edited track title. In Toast I used the Get Track Info... window in the Disc menu to enter the album/artist/track info. The tracks appear in Toast's audio CD window. There is no way for them to automatically appear in the Convert window.

 

Selecting Export as file from the Options button next to a track presents a window with a list of export formats. However, there is no way to export all the tracks at once except to send them to iTunes or Toast. It also doesn't work to drag the tracks to the desktop as an export alternative as it did with earlier versions. In fact, it isn't possible to save the Spin Doctor project to work on later. If you don't choose Save before quitting Spin Doctor you lose everything that was recorded. Choosing Save just gets you a file you can open but without any of the work you might have done in marking tracks. The default format that Spin Doctor selects when choosing Save is not a good choice. I suggest selecting AIFF and changing the Data Format to 16 bit. Of course, this doesn't matter if you already sent your project to Toast or iTunes.

 

At this point I think it may be best to use the previous Spin Doctor. If you like the way this one captures from selected applications (it's a feature I like) then capture with this version and save as a 16-bit AIFF file and open that in the previous version to finish your track work.

[tsantee]

THANKS for the information

In previous versions of Cd Spin doctor when you opened a file a wave for appeared an you could either use the automatic or manual way of marking tracks. It doesn't do that anymore and clicking manual in the preference box doesn't do anything until you click on the icon to seperate the tracks then you get some tracks colored and some not colored.

But your information helps

Dan

You can still choose to either manually or automatically mark tracks after the waveform appears. Just make sure "Auto-define immediately after recording is complete" is not checked in the Auto-define preferencesI don't know if automatic marking is working because it marked the entire recording as one track on the only test I've done. "Manual" in the preferences is only for manually setting the sliders used in automatic track marking. It has nothing to do with manually marking tracks. Because the entire recording was marked as a track I had to delete it that so there was unselected area in the waveform to where I could manually drag my track markers.

 

Addendum: I just discovered that I was doing my tests on Spin Doctor X verson 1.0 rather than the 1.0.1 update that was recently released. It hadn't yet been updated on the Mac I used for the testing. Some of my issues (such as naming the tracks) are fixed but I need to do the whole test again to see what else is fixed.

[dan McCarter]

I was able to find my CD for toast 10 and after installing it and getting it;s latest update I am now back in business as usual.

thanks

Dan

You can still choose to either manually or automatically mark tracks after the waveform appears. Just make sure "Auto-define immediately after recording is complete" is not checked in the Auto-define preferencesI don't know if automatic marking is working because it marked the entire recording as one track on the only test I've done. "Manual" in the preferences is only for manually setting the sliders used in automatic track marking. It has nothing to do with manually marking tracks. Because the entire recording was marked as a track I had to delete it that so there was unselected area in the waveform to where I could manually drag my track markers.

 

Addendum: I just discovered that I was doing my tests on Spin Doctor X verson 1.0 rather than the 1.0.1 update that was recently released. It hadn't yet been updated on the Mac I used for the testing. Some of my issues (such as naming the tracks) are fixed but I need to do the whole test again to see what else is fixed.

[dan McCarter]

The problem I am having is that the wave form never appears after you choose to open a new file. The only way to make the wave form appear is to click on Manual in the preferences than click the icon to automatically mark the selections. Then unmark all the selections that the program has made an then manually finish them

Dan

You can still choose to either manually or automatically mark tracks after the waveform appears. Just make sure "Auto-define immediately after recording is complete" is not checked in the Auto-define preferencesI don't know if automatic marking is working because it marked the entire recording as one track on the only test I've done. "Manual" in the preferences is only for manually setting the sliders used in automatic track marking. It has nothing to do with manually marking tracks. Because the entire recording was marked as a track I had to delete it that so there was unselected area in the waveform to where I could manually drag my track markers.

 

Addendum: I just discovered that I was doing my tests on Spin Doctor X verson 1.0 rather than the 1.0.1 update that was recently released. It hadn't yet been updated on the Mac I used for the testing. Some of my issues (such as naming the tracks) are fixed but I need to do the whole test again to see what else is fixed.

[tsantee]

The problem I am having is that the wave form never appears after you choose to open a new file. The only way to make the wave form appear is to click on Manual in the preferences than click the icon to automatically mark the selections. Then unmark all the selections that the program has made an then manually finish them

Dan

You may not be waiting long enough for the waveform to appear. If you are opening a compressed audio file such as AAC or MP3 the waveform won't appear until after Spin Doctor finishes uncompressing it. If you open an uncompressed audio file (such as AIFF) you should see the waveform appear in a short time. At least that is what I'm experiencing.