In my journey to get my record done I have spent the past 6 months on mixing and mastering. Along the way I picked up a lost of mastering plug-ins: Fabfilter bundle, TDR bundle, Ozone 10 and Pulsar Mu/Massive.
And finally Wavelab 11. I now wish I had made these purchases in reverse as 64-bit / 96 kHz is my chosen format to future proof my recordings.
In Wavelab only Tokyo Dawn, Pulsar and the integrated Steinberg plug-ins are showing as 64-bit native.
I was wondering if I’m doing something wrong as I have both VST3 and AudioUnits installed for pretty much everything. I had also been installing the VST2 support but going forward I’m not sure I have a reason to do that as I’m not using any DAW that supports VST2.
You can determine the Plugin Processing Precision in the WaveLab Preferences/Global/Audio but you cannot tell the plugins themselves how to appear in the plugin list.
Some of my 3rd party plugins still show 32-bit float for the VST3 version, and some show 64-bit. This is really up to the plugin developer to handle and some are slower than others, and some are more interested than others to add 64-bit float precision.
While I understand that 64-bit float is better on paper, I don’t think I would lose sleep or let it affect my plugin decisions but if it’s important to you, you have to write to the plugin developer(s) and ask when they plan to have 64-bit float precision versions of their plugins.
Some of them may even offer you a beta version of the plugin to try if they’ve started the 64-bit float precision upgrade.
Ima draw from my math and DSP background and stick with a pure 64-bit pipeline.
I did my first test render yesterday. I put the tracks in a 96 kHz / 64-bit montage as per your tutorial, put a Master Rig on each clip with a slightly tweaked mastering preset and then had Pulsar Mu (10% NY mix w/ Classic -3db preset) followed by TDR Limiter GE for the consistent limit and final true peak clipping.
My first wav render to tracks was set to 96 kHz / 24bit with the stock dither. I was frankly quite impressed with the clarity. Possibly a bit clinical sounding but very musical.
Now I am wondering about setting track-to-track LUFS values. I was mostly eyeballing it with the waveform height in the intermediate render but the actual values vary by up to ± 8 LUFS.
When I first encountered the Wavelab tutorial I was taken aback by the learning curve but after a week I can definitely say this is sounding and working exactly the way I wanted.
PS. If anyone is trying to use Wavelab on M1 and you get no sound or the timeline plays at the wrong speed, go into Audio MIDI Setup (macOS system utility) and set the kHz of the driver to your timeline kHz. That solved it for me.
Check the Loudness Meta Normalizer in the Audio Montage for this. With the “Top Of Loudness Range” option chosen, I think it does a very good musical job of settings all songs to the same apparent loudness.
