Mixing a whole album

[Jim of Seattle]

I'm putting together an album of my songfight songs from last year. I'm going to be giving them away to whomever wants one. Anyway, one of the things I want to do is make the album sound coherent as a whole, by making the sound consistent from song to song. I have an idea of how I think I should go about this, but I'm looking for advice, as I've never tried it before. Here's the plan:

1. For each song, go back into the original sequencer (Sonar) project and re-record whatever needs re-recording. In the sequencer I've added effects and EQ, but no compression. Some of the effects are destructive and some aren't. Most aren't.
2. Export separate wav files for each of these parts: Lead vocal, bg vocals, percussion, bass, and one combined file for all other instruments (piano, organ, guitar, whatever)
3. Once all the songs are finished, I want to go into Cool Edit (Adobe Audition) and set up a project where all the songs are lined up in a big horizontal sequence, with each part in a separate row (just like it is in a single song). That way I can look at, for example, all the drum tracks in the album and fix levels on the ones that are different from the rest. I would do that for all the parts.
4. Once all the levels are the same across the album, I would then apply compression to the entire album as a whole.

Note that my songs do not employ similar ensembles of instruments from song to song. It's going to be a wildly eclectic grab bag, as some of you may know.

Does this sound like a good way to do it? And while I'm at it, does anyone know how to (or whether I even can) make a single Cool Edit project consisting of separate songs, that I can process together but export as separate files?

Thanks in advance!

[jack]

one way to work around what you're talking about is something i've done within a Protools session (which i'm sure is similar). import all the songs as seperate bounced stereo tracks that have been brought up to adequate levels like you mentioned. so you'll have maybe 10 or so tracks where each track is a song. now save the session. as the lengths are not all the same, the track will bounce down (post mastering now) to the length of the longest track. so to avoid this (and having to go back and edit it again to cut the extra length), you delete all the tracks except the one you want to bounce down. bounce that track down. close your session but DO NOT SAVE IT. open it again and all the tracks are there again. repeat for each track. this way, you can eyeball all the tracks together and master them as individual seperate song tracks. it's pretty easy actually.

[brad]

I'd say work on the songs one by one, then try to get their volumes to match. Then do a lot of listening to the album to pick up on any peaks or valleys and adjust as needed.

When I was doing my album I thought about joining everything together into one big file but eventually it just seemed too cumbersome and I couldn't think of a good reason to do it that way either. Applying effects across an entire 40 minute+ set seems scary to me. Like you'll be trying to fix a problem in track #8 and you'll screw up something in track #2. Hard to manage.

As your production probably won't vary in quality much, I think the only thing you really have to worry about is maintaining the volume level between tracks to make the set sound cohesive.

[fluffy]

Or you can take the lazy approach that I did for most of Songfight Hot and Bothered and just pipe the whole thing through the same multiband compressor settings. It totally kills your dynamic range, though, if you care about that, but your songs never really struck me as using a lot of dynamics. Not that I've heard many non-classical albums mastered in the last 30 years which do anyway.