I am thinking of purchasing Elements 9 but have some questions:
Question 1:
I want to import wave files from my non-Steinberg daw, edit the tops and tails, add fadeouts, add a vst mastering limiter to each track to get them all the same level, then burn the rendered files to a CD.
Here is the question: Once I do the above can I save it as a project then at a later time
remix one of the songs in my daw, replace the existing wave file in the Wavelab project without loosing the top and tail, fadeout, vst plugin information? I don’t want to have to redo the top and tails, fadeout, vst every time I remix one of the songs and bring it back into the Wavelab project. Is this possible?
Question 2:
Can I do the above scenario but instead of burning to a CD, can I send the rendered wave files to a folder instead?
I also don’t know about Elements but in WaveLab Pro 9, you can easily render WAV, mp3, AAC and a variety of other files from the montage based on the CD Track Markers as well as render a DDP or burn a CD-R. With the right metadata preset, you can transpose the CD-Text over to metadata so the rendered WAV files have good metadata tagging and you only have to enter that info one time. When I render WAV or mp3 from the montage, I use the naming scheme option to automatically add a two digit numeric prefix to each file name (not to be confused with song title metadata) so the files are named “01 Song Title, 02 Song Title, 03 Song Title” so that the files remain in some kind of basic order. You can also tell WaveLab to add the track number/track total to the ID3 metadata so that the numeric prefix doesn’t need to be in the song title metadata but some apps can read the metadata for the track order.
I use the CD Track Splice markers rather than a track followed by track start marker so that any spacing between songs is built into the files though I believe there is a new feature in version 9 to include gaps between markers in rendered files. Before I render anything, I re-qunatize all the CD track splice markers to the nearest CD frame so that whether I make a DDP, CD-R, or render WAV/mp3 files from the montage, they all have the exact same precise timing.
Aside from being able to easily replace a file in a montage with a new mix, you can also easily recreate an entire montage at another sample rate if you need to. For example, if you make a montage at 44.1k but have a matching set of files at 96k, you can instruct WaveLab to make a new montage with the 96k files and it will match everything else. Now you can render a "high resolution’ version of the master or do some adjustments for a vinyl pre-master.
Again, I can’t speak for Elements but WaveLab Pro can do all this and for me it’s worth every penny and highly recommended.