Mixed WaveLab 12 "how to"/"is it possible" questions

WaveLab
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I’ll put some additional context in a “TL;DR” section below, but a quick summary is that I’m semi-new to WaveLab (using the latest version of WaveLab 12 on Windows 10) and working on mastering my upcoming album consisting of tracks that were previously mastered in Cubase 13 or 14 as standalone recordings. I’ve specifically been doing the work in the audio montage, with all album tracks as clips in a single montage track.

In no specific order, here are my questions. If applicable, links to “how to” videos and/or where to look in the manual (or just names of features to search for as not knowing feature names is often the thing that sometimes makes it hard for me to find what I need in the manual) would be especially welcome:

  1. After initially letting the album wizard configure default track spacing, I tried editing the spacing manually, in most cases wanting to shorten the time between tracks. I was specifically editing pre-gap times in the Clips window since the Album tab would not let me edit pre-gap or post-gap times. However, when I tried to render individual tracks to files after that, sometimes multiple album tracks got merged into a single file, for example with tracks 2 and 3 being in one file. I think this may relate to short gaps, and maybe some resulting (automatic) deletion of end of album track markers. However, there was always a gap – i.e. the clips did not overlap and always had some minimal space between them (I think no less than 200 ms, but I’m not positive on the exact numbers). Is this the right way to shorten inter-track timing, or, if not, how should it be done? If it is the right way, how do I avoid the scenario where tracks get merged into single rendered files?

  2. Some of the individual tracks had some heavy-duty inserts on them, and when I added an also somewhat heavy-duty peak limiter (Arturia Bus Peak) to the Output inserts, a few of those tracks could no longer play back cleanly (my computer is fairly old). Is there a way to non-permanently “freeze” the clip insert processing (or render it to a file that still gives the potential to revert to the live inserts in case I need to make changes later) to save CPU power in this case?

  3. I am aware how to replace a clip’s underlying audio file after mix changes (I had to remix one of the songs due to a lyric change, and that worked flawlessly). However, I’m wondering about the best way to handle a potentially related need: Once I have finalized the mastering on the album, I will want to remaster the instrumental and karaoke tracks from their unmastered mixes with identical mastering settings. The instrumental and karaoke mix tracks will all have the same boundaries as the full mix tracks. I don’t think I want to just replace the files from the main mix, but I’m wondering if there is some way to essentially clone the Audio Montage twice, but have each clone replace the individual clips without affecting the original montage, preferably all within a single WaveLab project (for archival purposes)?

  4. Finally, after a car listening test to the first draft album master results, I’ve determined I need more work at level balancing some of the tracks. It’s possible I may need to remix a few of the tracks (or totally redo the master processing), but I’m wondering if WaveLab has any facility that works similarly to the meta-normalize feature but, specifically, bases its analysis on vocal levels? In particular, the album has mixed genres, and I’m thinking that trying to keep vocal levels feeling consistent over the course of the album may be the best strategy for level matching in the flow between tracks. (Outside of WaveLab, the one idea that comes to mind is taking my current draft masters into SpectraLayers Pro, using that to separate out the vocals, then doing some analysis on the vocals from that in order to tweak post-insert levels in WaveLab.) Or alternately, does anyone have suggestions for other strategies? (A car listening to last night’s results demonstrated that my ears in WaveLab, or even just listening to the album on my computer speakers, weren’t close enough.)

For anyone who wants/needs more context, here goes:

TL;DR

All thirteen tracks for the album have been mastered standalone in Cubase, with eleven of those having already been released as singles, and the other two also mastered in Cubase without consideration for fit in an album. While I did use WaveLab 12 for assembling a CD version of my most recent EP, and also for rendering various audio file formats, the actual mastering for that was done in Cubase 14, and with the fit of individual tracks into a coherent whole in mind.

With respect to the new album, with a small number of exceptions, I was reasonably pleased with the standalone mixes and masters. Not being a professional mastering engineer (though I’ve mastered all my releases to date – six albums, three EPs, and upwards of sixty singles since 2006), I was looking to minimize any “reinventing the wheel” in remastering the individual recordings for the album. In a number of cases, the mastering chains were doing some heavy lifting to resolve mix-level problems.

Thus, my strategy was to do my best to recreate the individual single track mastering chains from Cubase in WaveLab, along with any per-track cuts for boundaries and fade envelopes, hoping I could mostly just do level matching for loudness, track spacing, metadata creation, etc. in WaveLab. For example, I went back to the original Cubase projects to document the mastering chains and save presets within the individual plugins in those chains, while also documenting the in/out points for the 32- or 64-bit unmastered mix, and the heads/tails fade-in/fade-out timings.

Once I had the tracks set up in this manner within WaveLab’s audio montage, I used the album wizard to do default track spacing and album marker creation. I then used the meta-normalize feature with post-insert effects leveling to get to starting points in level balancing, with a few different iterations on that, one that got a lot closer than the other. That all made for too quiet levels by turning down the Output fader, so I put that back to default and slapped a mastering-oriented limiter in the Output section, just doing True Peak limiting, no gain change, and that much worked pretty well.

From there, I initially tried changing the between track gaps for aesthetic timing purposes, but (as noted above), failed miserably and ended up, for now at least, reverting back to the automatic spacing. Then I manually balanced the one track that was clearly out of whack on level balancing. There are mixed genres on the album, but that specific track was way different than the rest, just acoustic guitars, vocal, and whistling, kind of an in an old folk style (I’m more or less using it as a “bonus track” at the end of the album due to that difference), whereas the rest tend toward a mix of country rock or soft rock and singer-songwriter-type stuff.

While I was feeling like levels were reasonably matched as of late last night, I did my first full album car listening test today, and it is my observations from that that are (mostly) the source of these questions.

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  1. I have no clue because normally this is not possible unless the title overlaps, and even in that case, you normally get an error message. If you have a montage where you can reproduce this, then send it to me for analysis.

  2. There is no search function exactly, but you can somehow simulate it. One way is to use the bounce function. One way is to use the bounce function on the clip, and if you need to revert, then you need to select the original audio file for this clip. Another way is to use the SuperClip function, but this would add more complexity to your project.

  3. Cloning a montage is easy. There are several functions for this. Look in the file view for “New Montage” and see the option there.

  4. WaveLab has no function that works only on vocals. I guess the help of an application like SpectraLayers that can split the audio into several components would help.

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Yes SpectraLayers is a cool app and can be used inside WaveLab as an External Editor.

regards S-EH

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Thanks for the responses. Over the past few days, I’ve done a bunch of additional searching and experimentation (some successful and some not at all), and those led me to areas of WaveLab I either hadn’t been aware of at all or hadn’t been familiar enough to realize they might be helpful, and I’m at least at the stage of having a new set of renders worth taking for a car listening test.

More on that in my notes on the specific responses:

I’d ended up just undoing my changes to get back to where it had been before the problem, so I don’t have a file to recreate this. My best guess at this point is that the second clip (i.e. the one that got merged into the preceding album track’s file when rendered) may have gotten close enough to the first track to have its start prior to the end marker for the previous track.

After a bunch of additional searching, reading, and watching videos on the CD markers/inter-song gaps consideration, I ultimately ended up doing some batch changes and deletions of marker types, changing all but the first start marker to a splice marker and deleting all but the last end marker. Then I learned there is a way to bind the markers to the start of clips (and the final end marker to the end of the final track), after which, just moving the clips also adjusts the markers (and there are no longer any end markers between tracks to worry about.

Given my (new) understanding that splice markers are really the way to go for CD markers in WaveLab these days, it might be helpful if the default CD Wizard settings used those (and also bound the markers to the clips being used to delineate the tracks).

I assume you meant “freeze” where you said “search”, but wouldn’t the method you mention here with the bounce remove the clip inserts? If not (e.g. if it just disables them, or even if they are preserved but can be manually disabled), that could work, though I would also wonder if any clip envelope editing that was done would be able to be lost (since it would be needed if replacing the bounced file with the original). I ultimately ended up must deactivating the limiter on the output temporarily when I got into problem territory. (This was mostly an issue when trying to figure out track spacing because the audio artifacts appeared to affect the playback speed, and I was using musical timing to get a feel for placement of the subsequent track.)

Thanks for the tip. I will keep this in mind next time. I never would have thought of “new montage” as having an option to use the content of the current montage. I ultimately ended up doing a File/Save As, then changing one copy’s name to add a version number. I’m guessing your way would have saved a few steps.

I did end up trying to use SpectraLayers Pro (standalone, though – I’ll keep the external editor possibility in mind should I want to use it on a WaveLab project in the future), using the unmix song capability to split into the vocal and “everything else”, then exporting both layers to audio files for analysis. For the analysis, I just using a tool I’ve used for years that tells me dynamic range, along with peak and RMS levels for the files. Unfortunately, after entering these statistics into a spreadsheet for analysis, I realized the RMS measurements on the vocal files were useless because of so many silent areas between vocal lines. I’ve since learned there are some statistics WaveLab’s loudness analysis puts out that might have been more helpful with the vocal layer analysis. Of course, whether my leveling strategy idea here would have ended up working, even given more useful statistics, is a question mark.

I ultimately learned about the loudness report in the Analyze tab, and its ability to export CSV files, which I could read into Excel for further review and analysis, especially after plugging in the clip post-gain figures that WaveLab’s meta-normalize feature had come up with (or that I’d manually tweaked in an earlier round). Those helped me make (hopefully) more intelligent decisions. This may actually be my new favorite feature in WaveLab as it let me review the effect of changes I was making prior to actually rendering files. (While doing the loudness analysis takes a while on my system, it is nowhere near as long as it takes to render the files.)

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Yes “Freeze”. And yes, you are right, this will remove the clip insert. So this is not a good solution.
The SuperClip remains the solution, however.

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I had not encountered these before (other than seeing the term in the UI), so had to read through the manual section on these to get a better idea of what Super Clips are.

Given my particular context on this project (i.e. songs that had been mastered standalone in Cubase previously, with no album-type considerations and wanting to start with the mastering chains from those for working on album-level master), after reading the information on Super Clips, I’m thinking I might have been better off creating each individual song in its own audio montage, complete with doing the individual song-/track-level processing, including the basic clip trimming for in/out points, in that song-specific montage, then making each song-level audio montage as a Super Clip within a parent montage, where I’d do the fade-ins/fade-outs, level balancing, and dealing with CD markers and such.

Beyond the “freeze”-like consideration, I’m thinking it would have actually made it quicker to do the trimming of in and out points since I could use the Cubase timing references directly instead of having to do a bit of mental math based on offsets. Of course, I could still do additional processing in the parent montage if needed, but it would still offer the option of going back to the sub-montage and tweaking the original single song mastering chain if needed.

The Super Clips may come in handy in the future since my typical modus operandi is producing a song at a time, be it for a specific project or “just because”, and putting it out as a single. Any potential album considerations generally come much later, once I’ve collected enough recordings that I can somehow rationalize as fitting together.

As I get more used to WaveLab Pro, I may also consider using it for single song mastering. At least for the moment, though, generating stems, and wanting their master chain processing to stay consistent with the full mix’s master probably makes it easier to just keep doing the single song mastering in Cubase.