Free DDP mastering tools updated


While the CD industry is effectively collapsing, the job still has to be done somehow. Andreas Ruge, a recording engineer from Germany, released an update to his DDP mastering tools for Linux, Windows and Mac.

The project contains several command-line tools to manipulate DDP images that are used for Red Book CD audio mastering. The list of changes is rather small, but we never mentioned this project before, and the release of the new version looks like a good enough excuse to finally do that. Mostly this version introduces MD5 and CRC32 checksum files generation to the cue2ddp application and ships improved documentation.

It still is quite unclear what legal status the project has, which is why source code isn’t yet available. DDP is one of those proprietary file formats that gained popularity in the industry despite of questionable licensing policy of its vendor. This is where film indistry clearly has an advance with the open DCP standard.

Builds for 32bit version of Linux, Windows and Mac (Darwin) are available. Andreas is also wondering whether support for other proprietary CD image formats like PMI (Pyramix Workstation) or JAM is required by users. If you need it, please let him know.