Some of my favorite new features that might be less obvious:
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Ability to use key commands to arrange the file order in the “Insert Audio Files” box of the montage. (command + up or down arrow on Mac)
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CD Track Groups which are quite useful for making vinyl and cassette pre-masters which are quite popular with my clients. Most of the time for vinyl and cassette I make one continuous file per album side (vinyl can be 24-bit/high sample rate of course) and now I can make them all in one montage and have the “CD Report” reflect the correct track times for side A and B (instead of only side A). Audio CD Reports can be done for only the CD Track Group as well which is very useful. In the past, I had to make a special montage just for side B that started at 0:00 so the track times on the report for each side made sense with the audio file for that side. Of course, the existing CD track makers can be added to the WAV files as well, but I always send along a PDF report for each side because not everybody can see the markers easily.
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Custom Montage Copy: Often times I have a folder of 96k or 88.2k files from my analog capturing session and another folder of identical files down-sampled to 44.1k because I prefer to use a 3rd party Sample Rate converter before finalizing in WaveLab. This could change now with the new Resampler overhaul but the point is now after the client approves a 44.1k version of the master, with just a few clicks I can recreate the motange at 88.2k or 96k in a matter of seconds and have the montage perfectly created at another sample rate with all markers, fades, clips, metadata and everything else in tact. Saves a lot of time over the manual way of doing it and prevents human error.
-Naming Scheme: For normal album masters when I render WAV or mp3 files of the master files for each track, I’ll simply add a numeric prefix to the file name and all the files go in one folder. This was already possible in 8.5 but the Naming Scheme goes farther. Sometimes for single song projects I want a few formats of WAV files for the same song in the same folder, so the naming scheme makes it easy to add _1644 or _2496 to the end of the file name to differentiate between the two resolutions and prevent a duplicate file name in the same folder.
-Ability to have more than one Global Analysis window open at a time for individual files.
-Plugin chain copy/paste. Now you can copy and paste an entire plugin chain without having to save it as a preset temporarily.
All this on top of the new look, workflow, better stability and 3rd party plugin support, and other major new features is sure to be a big time saver. Thanks to PG for a great new update.