Cubase has really grown over the years and at this point is very feature rich. In fact, I dropped Nuendo and moved to Cubase because there wasn’t really that much more that it did to justify the price (I initially bought Nuendo in the early days before they tripled the price to gain credibility in the Post market).
That said, I also have UR 22 / 44s and CMC controllers that I’m very happy with, so I always keep an eye on what Steinberg is offering. With that in mind, I was looking at Wavelab and I’m really not sure what it brings to the party that Cubase doesn’t do for me already - or could do with the purchase of mastering oriented VSTs, etc.
Is Wavelab’s existance largely that of a legacy product that originated back in the days when Cubase wasn’t as capable as it is today to fill those gaps? Or is there a significant feature set it delivers that takes me beyond what Cubase already does? Looking at the product info, it’s really not clear to me - I look at the Why Wavelab page and get the sense that I could probably do all those things in Cubase.
Would value your thoughts on what it brings to the party.
Well then maybe Cubase should start including these ‘track markers’
I bought WaveLab a long time ago. Installed on my 1st DAW…I never actually used it & never installed it again on DAW’s that followed it. In all fairness I didn’t really understand it at the time.
“If you have to ask the question, then you probably don’t need it.”
I’ve found that the single greatest tool for increasing my knowledge is the phrase, “I don’t know,” and I’m absolutely fearless in its use.
All joking aside, from the responses here and there it seems like Cubase is not as good a choice for mastering as Wavelab is, in addition to Wavelab’s support for CDs.
theres also meta normalizer to equalize all track volumes on your C.D. to be, then you dont have a sore thumb scenario ,track text which is always handy.checks to see if there will be any clipping before burning to C.D.
Is the meta normalizer different from typcial normalization of simply raising levels until the highest peak hits your limit?
Perceived volume can of course vary wildly between tracks that have been normalized, so if the meta normalizer takes that into account to automatically level perceived volume, that would be very worthwhile.
That’s almost worth the price of admission in and of itself.
I’m currently working on a live show with some backing keyboard tracks, and I haven’t been looking forward to solving the problem of leveling them out so that the sound man doesn’t have to go diving for the fader from song to song.
Now where did I put that credit card? I think it’s whimpering over in the corner somehwere, hoping I won’t notice…
I record a lot of live concerts (mostly classical and jazz). I often fly them into Cubase, slice and dice to get song start/end points, pick tracks to use, set up a general mix (normally 2-4 tracks) etc… But then I do all of the rest in Wavelab. I will generally do the following in WL:
Make any panning adjustments if needed, really only if something is way off balance. I use the normalize pan for this. or make pan adjustments based on file analysis of average pan.
Normalizing AVERAGE levels, using the LUFS scale. This is extremely valuable and easy to do in WL. It will also set peak stops.
Draw volume curves for finer edits to achieve a given loudness and listenability based on pieces.
All fade ins/outs
Scrub out some sonic junk from time to time. For example, I recorded a small orchestra in a church and got a lovely thumping sound from a 4 yr old girl in the first pew who thought it would be fun to kick the pew rail. I used spectral editing in WL to isolate the frequency where the thumps lived, and reduced them. WL did a bang up job in this regard - couldn’t even tell they were there in the final recording and the rest of the audio was left in tact.
And of course - I use WL to render files in various formats and to burn CDs.
The audio editing capability in WL far exceeds that of Cubase. For simple stuff in the context of mixing, Cubase is fine. But for more detailed work on a stereo file, WL is where it’s at.
