Yep. I use it sometimes that way - ofcourse you don’t get the nice morphing dancing DR bars…
Here’s another one:
Wavelab is the same price as Cubase 6, so I don’t think you can call £500 an affordable price, especially as you can do most things in Cubase that Wavelab does, most users will not find the £500 price tag very tempting.
It is the audio montage which begins to make Wavelab the one to use though.
Not true. You can only do a limited number of things in Cubase, and not as precise as in Wavelab. I think Bane is right, plus, you don’t exactly need to start with full Wavelab. WL Elements is already much much better than trying to master in Cubase.
Ah yes, I knew that but had forgotten 
Anyway to be controversial, it really doesn’t matter how loud you decide to do your final mix/master (within reason) as if you’re lucky enough to get your material broadcast and they use the EBU R 128 standard, your mix will sound more or less as loud as everyone else’s!!! That’s the whole point. Of course if you’ve crushed the hell out of it, then you’ll notice it sounds crap compared to a good dynamic mix, and you don’t need EBU 128 metering to achieve that.
That is a very good point, Split. BUT, if you want to hear what your music will sound like when being broadcast on those stations that use the EBU R128 system, then having this plugin at our disposal comes in handy AND it’s free!! (Why does that feel like deja vu? lol).
well we’ll just have to wait and see if, once the broadcasters start using the new loudness standard, it stops record companies wanting the loudest mix out there. But if it stops the Adverts jumping out my speakers every 20 mins or so I’ll be eternally grateful.
Even if the recording companies don’t follow suit, they won’t gain any advantage from making loud/crappy records because it will sound just as loud as anything else being broadcast (assuming this becomes a worldwide loudness standard, which hopefully it will). Keeping the same trend of making things as loud as possible will only hurt them because people will realize how crappy the music sounds compared to dynamic music. Once we reach that point, heavy compression will be used stylistically rather than as a means to make things loud. These are great times for those of us who appreciate dynamic music. It was about time!!
You could end up with radio mix’s and still have squashed downloads and “public” CD’s
Louder=Better 
anyone looking for a commercial advantage! or I’m I just being cynical?
I guess the only way record companies are gonna stop with this loudness war is if people finally notice the quality difference between a dynamic recording and a compressed one. This is why it is necessary to educate the mass and make them aware of the problem. Only when consumers start demanding for dynamic content will this loudness war cease to exist. Until then, we can at least say that a part of the war has been won (and that’s better than nothing).
The glass is half full 
+1 fingers crossed, it it a clever system and stands a very good chance of changing things across the board.
CMIIW but the thing is it won’t get any louder like it used to do when you squeeze the last dB out of the mix. It will only get more compressed? Even a record company executive must be able to understand that?
That is only true when audio is played by a provider that is conforming to EBU R128.
In fact the mix will be exactly the same not more compressed, just the same(ish) volume as a less limited for volume track. As a loud mix will have a higher LUFS integrated reading the broadcaster will turn it down till it hits -23 LUFS. That’s the beauty of the system. It enables content of differing loudness to be relatively set around the same overall volume without compressing or limiting. Thus the hyper compressed mix will start to show it’s limitations because in the past LOUDER=BETTER but when compared to what in the past would have been a more dynamic mix but quieter the louder mix would win. Or if you’re a radio broadcaster, passed through multi-band compression/limiting to equalise the volume and add the stations “sound”. The hope being that this compression/limiting will be needed less and applied equally as all the source material will be of similar volume before any multi-band meddling. A similar thing applies for TV
But how does that apply to Internet Radio, downloads and other media that don’t conform… we’ll just have to see, as the skeptic in me says that if there is a commercial advantage in being louder than the competition then loudness will continue…
Yeah, and it will show that the compressed mix sounds like crap since there’s no dynamics left. It will definitely NOT be exactly the same. You do know the Loudness War clip? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Gmex_4hreQ
exactly. you will have a center of gravity to base your decisions around rather than going for brute force maximizing. In the end everybody wins with the first method mentioned. maximizing will just get tired and seem silly in the long run.
You can for aesthetic reasons chose to have limited dynamics in your special case production and pump up the volume AT THE PLAYBACK DEVICE, and it’s your choice, and maybe even a perfectly good choice.
Radio stations et al can compress all they want but if everything they play back has the same center of gravity it will give the station a sound without it being baked into the program material? Listen to the same stuff from another station and it may sound different.
Sorry that was misinterpreted from what I was saying, the hyper compressed mixes will sound like hyper compressed mixes, that is they will sound more or less the same as the source without another layer of major compression! and due to having the same(ish) center of gravity as a more dynamic mix will show its flaws. I’m saying the same thing!!!
Ah, you meant ‘exactly the same’ in the sense of ‘the same perceived loudness’. OK 
Couldn’t it have mixing value on individual tracks as well - to display the track’s RMS and Crest Factor rather than the simple peak meter Cubase offers?