Since hitting their peak in sales at the turn of the millennium, CDs have seen a steady decline year after year. That said, all physical mediums are experiencing a small resurgence these days, and while that’s primarily led by vinyl, CDs have trended upward the last couple of years, as well. Getting your music ready for a CD release requires a special extra step: the creation of a DDP. Let’s talk what is a DDP in music, what goes into it, and how to make one.
What is a DDP in Music
DDP stands for digital description protocol. This is a special set of files which CD replication plants utilize to create perfect replicas of an album of music on CD.
This is typically part of the audio mastering process which not only involves getting your music sounding as good as possible, but ensuring it’s ready for whatever format or medium you plan to release your music on.
Essentially if you want to release your music on CD, you’re going to need a DDP.
The DDP fileset includes the audio for the songs itself, the tracklist, information regarding gaps between tracks, and metadata regarding the album and songs themselves.
Let’s cover each of these in a bit more depth to explain why they’re important and how they’re used in the DDP.
Audio
This is straightforward enough, but it bears worth mentioning that the audio for the songs needs to be in WAV or AIFF format at 16 bit depth (the physical limitation of CDs). Speaking of which, check out my bit depth comparison to better understand how 16, 24, and even 32 bit depths compare.
Tracklist
The tracklist is sequencing is the order of songs as you’d like them to play on the album. Thankfully with CDs you don’t have to worry about the physical limitations of vinyl with regards to the narrowing of the grooves at the end of each side like I mentioned in my overview of mastering for vinyl.
In the same vein, the audio for your digital masters also works just fine for the CD, outside of maybe needing to dither the bit depth down to be 16 bit like I just mentioned.
Gaps
Part of making the DDP is determining the gaps (if any) you want between tracks. You can set certain songs to flow into another, or even add a song you can only access by REWINDING from the first track like the case with Fall Out Boy’s excellent “Folie a Deux” record. There’s also a required pregap of 2 seconds which plays before the first track to ensure the CD plays properly.
Metadata
Metadata is information related to the music and release which gets written to the CD alongside the music.
When the CD is read/played or even ripped in certain audio players or computers, part of that information is displayed such as the album/artist/song name(s).
Aside from that, you also have tracking information for royalty attribution written to the CD in the form of ISRC codes for individual songs, and the UPC code for the album itself.
How to Make a DDP
So how to you make a DDP?
Unfortunately, you need software which is specifically designed to create the special fileset of the DDP.
Because this software can run you hundreds of dollars like in the case of Sonoris DDP Creator which I use, it’s more practical to simply have the mastering engineer creator a DDP for you.
It’s also for the best that a professional mastering engineer creates the DDP for you, because any errors in the DDP will translate to errors in the replications which can be a very costly mistake.
Theoretically or better said ideally the CD replication plant will catch any technical problems, but if it’s an issue with sequencing or gaps, that could be a very frustrating and expensive surprise to be blindsided with when you get a huge stack of CDs back you paid for and something is wrong.
If you’d like to put out your music on CD, contact me at Music Guy Mastering for a very affordable rate to get your music ready for CD release via a DDP.
