Command line version of WaveLab

Please guys, make a command line version of WaveLab so a programmer like me won’t have to deal with all the popups and error message or even crashes if the UI doesn’t load fast enough or when the software closes too fast while a batch process is running. The audio department i work for has so many files to process every week, we have a batch farm of 10 machines with WaveLab on them but WaveLab is not the best fit for this need. We have to use so many tricks and hacks to kind of make it work, but even with that i have to go manually check on every machine of our batch farm and click on pop ups or error messages. Also visual basic is not the language the most suited and just brings additional issues to the whole thing, there are much more adapted languages to interact with a software nowadays like Python. It would be awesome to have a python library for WaveLab but even a command line to run batch processes would be good. WaveLab is an amazin software, it’s just too bad the programming side didn’t evolve on the last versions.

That’s not a bad idea!

You already have some possibilities:

  • use watch folders. I know a big company that even run WaveLab on virtual machines, without any UI.
  • use ActiveX scripting (Windows). See related doc.

The watch folder is an option but has too much limitations :

  • You can’t specify patterns instead of an explicit path as the watch folder
  • I don’t know if it’s not possible or if i didn’t find how to do it but i can’t reorganize my tasks in the watch folder window
  • the preset file is a binary file so i can’t even make a template out of it and tweak it from my code. I don’t know why the Steinberg team didn’t use a simple json or xml file to store the paths to the watch folder/batproc file/log file.
    Basically, with my huge and complex folder structure , i would still need to create watch folder presets manually

The ActiveX scripting is the thing i’m using at the moment and for which i mentionned the issues related to in my first post.

You can’t specify patterns instead of an explicit path as the watch folder

What do you mean? Example maybe.

BTW, please be aware that a watch folder (hence a batch processor), can accept XML files where the path to the audio file is stored. WaveLab will read that information (some WaveLab settings needed for this).

Thanks for the info about the xml, i’ll look into that, this could save me =P
By pattern for the path, i mean something like that :
C:\projects*\languages*\input_files
So waveLab would look into

C:\projects\MyProject\languages\spanish\input_files

as well as

C:\projects\MyOtherProject\languages\french\input_files

and so on, just with one preset file

The JavaScript (not ActiveX) feature, allows WaveLab to render files. This means, you could have javascript scripts that process any file you like.

I started a thread about scripting some years ago, but it’s now lost in the WaveLab 8 section:
WaveLab scripting questions
There you can see my first experiments using PowerShell to run WaveLab.
Perhaps we could have a top-level forum section for scripting? (i.e. not version-related)

i’d love to have that kind of subforum