Long-time user of WaveLab, much respect to @PG1 for the many years of the evolution of WaveLab! Thank you!
I have some new use-cases that have been happening that have made me see the benefits of the DAWproject file exchange format, and I think a lot of people might benefit from adding DAWproject to WaveLab. Hopefully PG will consider this for WL soon! And hopefully it’s not a hugely complex feature request. The DAWproject XML standard itself is open source and looks pretty straightforward.
Basically, IMO, WaveLab’s audio montage has evolved in such a way that is has become a powerful and unique DAW in and of itself. The workflow and usage cases of WaveLab’s audio montage have extended and grown way beyond mastering to other kinds of projects and workflows such as: broadcast, spot prodution, ad production, sound design, podcast (of course, that’s a great use case for WaveLab Cast!), audio drama, other multimedia workflows, video/film audio replacement, etc… evidenced by the excellent flexibility of the audio montage…
The DAWproject file format is now supported by Cubase, Nuendo, Bitwig, Studio One, and Reaper. By adding DAWproject to WaveLab, that would greatly open the capabilities of WaveLab for project exchange with the audio montage. And open WaveLab to become an even more helpful tool to support those other DAWs in new ways with new workflows.
For example, I’ve recently started some complex podcast and audio drama projects in WaveLab as an experiment and sure enough, the audio montage is up to the task. It is especially useful because of the excellent click-and-drag ripple editing features (thank you PG!).
However, in this situation, once the ripple editing phase is complete with the initial production, it would be super helpful to use the DAWproject file format to migrate the projects over to Cubase/Nuendo, with all the edits and source project files intact (without rendering the tracks, etc.). Then I could proceed to use my additional sound design tools and music sequencing tools in Cubase/Nuendo for the scoring, further sound design, etc…
There are also times where I’ve started a radio/broadcast project in Cubase, and I’ve wished I could rapidly move it over to WaveLab’s montage to do various things that only the montage can do. While having ARA support with WL12 has been super cool and helpful, there are times when I’d want all the Cubase tracks to be moved intact to an audio montage so I could work natively inside the audio montage in WL and do things that only the montage can do. And then in theory, it would be a dream to then export from WaveLab back to Cubase via DAWproject. Round trip bliss for certain kinds of projects! I can imagine other users of other DAWs would also see this benefit.
I’ve also got other kinds of jobs that started in Bitwig or Cubase, for example, and again I’d like to finish them in the WaveLab montage itself, or vice-versa.
Anyway, adding DAWproject file format to WaveLab would open up all sorts of useful and creative workflows with other DAWs and let users take advantage of some of the unique tools inside the audio montage without the current bouncing down of stems/tracks that we currently would have to do (and thus losing a huge amount of flexibility by losing the source edits, etc.).
I hope PG will consider it! And I hope it’s not too complex… after all, it’s just another XML format that is well-documented and it seems like it would fit the logical file structure of the audio montage well. Not every feature would be supported of course… Audio montages don’t support MIDI, etc… but the basic multitrack file structure with all the clips and source audio files, is all that would be needed for basic audio-only projects. If PG wanted to add the track VST settings that would be great too, since DAWproject supports it, among other features. The DAWproject XML seems pretty straightforward from my reading, and it looks like there would be a 1:1 correlation of many of the WL audio montage elements. And again, no problem with supporting a subset. Tempo maps, MIDI, etc., are not appropriate for WaveLab anyway.
In sum, the idea is that there are many kinds of WaveLab projects that would fit really well within the parameters of DAWproject and be super helpful to have that interoperability with other DAWs that support DAWproject.
Would also be a great bullet point feature for WL13’s release. (hint-hint 
)
Cheers! And crossing fingers PG will consider this for WL13.