With the recent discount on Wavelab I wondered if I might want to grab Wavelab pro. I am a Cubase pro user and already do own a dedicated audio editor (izotope RX10).
In my understanding, Wavelab is a specialist/expert tool for mastering. That being said, what mastering functions does Wavelab have that cannot not be achieved with Cubase and its stock plugins (or some mastering plugins from Waves, Sonnox etc)?
What have been your greatest benefits from using Wavelab?
Thanks in advance!
WaveLab and Cubase can both do stereo processing of audio, but there is more to mastering than that, and it’s not about the plugins either.
I would not want to mix projects in WaveLab, and I would not want to master projects in Cubase.
It’s about the vehicle used to perform the job. Do you want to drive a Buick around the race track? Or a Porsche?
It’s a really good article. To add to your comment “I was drawn to WaveLab because of the mastering environment that it creates, not just because of the plug-ins it comes with,” this is why I purchased WL as well, even though I have different iterations of Cubase and Nuendo.
For me, it helped to not only have a different technical environment for mastering, but a psychological one as well. I’ve tried “mastering in the DAW” and I found it far too distracting, and potentially schedule-impacting, to want to “go back and change just that one thing” since I was, after all, still in my DAW.
I now have a firm “pencils down” rule and use both technical, workflow, and even “policy-based” stop-gaps to keep me from backtracking. Having a completely different mastering environment serves me well in this regard, as does the decision to have WL be that solution.
Yes, the article is a little old and I think I wrote a part 2 that never came out but most of the info is still relevant, and WaveLab 12 adds even more great features like the Null Test Track and other improvements/additions.
Some of the plugin and tech companies have effectively redefined “mastering” as only the stereo processing/enhancement part of the mastering process which combined with other factors, has helped bury the less exciting but equally important parts of the mastering projects that software like WaveLab not only excels at but in some cases, can’t factually be done in a mixing DAW like Cubase or Pro Tools.
Thanks a Lot for your answers and for that very helpful article/tutorial.
Now I can exactly see where Wavelab would drastically speed up my mastering process. Recently I compiled an album with two dozen of songs originally recorded on cassette tape abd which had huge differences in Volume between songs. It took me hours of work to get these individual songs to halfway similar volume levels in Cubase.
This is where Wavelab excels. It has convenient and almost unrivaled tools for the intelligent management of volume in a collection of songs and is truly excellent for loudness analysis and loudness processing. It also possesses great metering and highly flexible montage editing and arrangement functions.
Great to know, thanks again!
Maybe one more question: Could you possibly point out which tools (except the reference track tool) do exist in Wavelab to automatically adapt the volume of single clips, or a specific semi-automatic workflow? This would probably be the single most important use case for me in WaveLab, so I am highly interested to get a better understanding of what I could expect.
Awesome, thank you so much for taking the time. This ist it!
