Recipes and per-file values with the Sheet

A recipe is an ordered list of steps. Each step is one site tool with its settings. The output of one step is the input of the next, so a recipe can trim, normalise and tag an episode in one go.

1. Start from the podcast template

Open File → Templates… and choose Podcast season mastering. The recipe Master episode has three steps:

1. Audio Cutter & Merger — trims each episode from {{start}} to {{end}} and fades in and out.
2. Audio Loudness Normalizer — preset Podcast stereo (−16 LUFS), MP3 at 128 kbit/s.
3. MP3 Tag & Cover Editor — writes {{title}}, {{artist}}, {{album}} and the track number {{index}}/{{count}}.

Reelcraft type-checks the chain while you edit: if a step cannot read what the previous step produces (for example an image step after an audio step), the step is marked and the problem is described in a full sentence. Steps can be switched off, moved up or down and removed; Add step offers only tools that fit the current kind of file.

2. Fill the Sheet

Open the Sheet view. It has one row per file and the columns title, artist, album, year, track, genre, credit, start, end and note. Type values directly, or:

• Use file names as titles fills empty titles from the file names.
• Number the tracks 1…n numbers the selected files in library order.
• Import CSV… reads a spreadsheet with a file column and any of the field names as headers; Export CSV writes the same layout.

Times are passed to the cutting tools as written; they accept seconds (5.5), mm:ss (1:30) or hh:mm:ss.mmm. An empty start or end means from the beginning or to the end.

3. Placeholders

In any text setting of a step, {{field}} is replaced with the file's Sheet value when the job runs. {{name}} is the file name without extension, {{index}} and {{count}} are the position in the batch. Empty values are left out of the tool call, so the tool's own default applies.

4. Run and check

Select the episodes and press Run. The queue shows each step's summary from the tool, for example the measured loudness before and after normalising. Add a Podcast episode (−16 LUFS) check in Checks to see at a glance which outputs are within ±1 LU and below −1 dBTP true peak.