Thats exactly what I’ve done, and the conclution is that Elements is too limited, while the Pro version contains lots of features that aren’t needed. I don’t do audio restoration or audio forensic work. What is needed is a version that cater for those of us who need the full facilities for authoring CD’s, but not all the other unnecessary (restoration and forensic) bells and whistles. i.e. WaveLab Artist.
Having three versions of Cubase has only benefitted it’s ability to grab marketshares. I wouldn’t be surprised if Cubase Artist is the best selling version. The same would hold true for WaveLab. A WaveLab Artist version would only serve to increase WaveLab’s marketshare.
WaveLab Elements, and an Artist version, are only cut-down versions of WaveLab Pro (which is where PG expends most of his energy). I am convinced that PG (and his team) are more than capable of handling an Artist level version, with little to no worries!
By the way, I’m sure that it is not inline with Steinberg’s buisness model to ask their customers to not purchase their products.
thanks for your suggestions. As you might know, we had this version already, called WaveLab Studio 6. It was available until end of 2010. This version had a comparable price point with Cubase Artist - and was never accepted in a way WaveLab Pro or WaveLab Elements has been. In more than 4 years of WaveLab Studio product lifecycle we haven’t seen much interest in this version. The logical consequence was to remove this version from the product line up.
you are safe to activate your version of WaveLab now. After WaveLab 9 has been released, just run the maintenance tasks on your eLCC and your license will update to 9 automatically.
Thanks Timo for your input. It’s most welcome to see someone who really knows what he’s talking about taking the time to respond on this forum.
I have a couple of comments to your response. You point at WaveLab Studio 6 ending in 2010. That’s more than 5 years ago. That’s a long time in the world of software. A lot has happened since then! For one thing, in 2010 WaveLab was Windows only. Since then it has expanded to the Mac. Being a Mac user, WaveLab was of no interest what so ever for me back in 2010. Thus I know nothing about WaveLab Studio 6, so I can only speculate.
What was the feature set of WaveLab Studio 6. There are three ways of developing a cut-down version:
Randomly removing a bunch of features, resulting in an unusable product.
Removing parts of all features, which is how WaveLab Elements is, more or less, constructed.
Determining a target audience, and see what features are required. Which is what I suggest.
Which of these three did WaveLab Studio 6 belong to? Perhaps the feature set was ill conceived for the target audience. Perhaps it wasn’t correctly marketed? As I’ve said, I can only speculate. I suggest a version aimed at the millions upon millions of studios that are not hobbyists, big time mastering houses or forensic audio laboratories, but have the need to author professionally constructed CD masters for duplication. I have provided some suggestions to a feature set in a previous post:
As things stand, Steinberg only caters the Mastering Houses, Universities and small time Hobbyists. You are ignoring a huge market. All those midlevel studios (millions of them) who need the ability to provide CD masters for their customers. The home-to-midlevel studio market has changed dramatically in the last five years. I’d say, it time for Steinberg to take a new look at the WaveLab line-up. I know some things about running a business and thing is for sure; ignoring a market segment consisting of millions of potential customers has never, and will never be, good business practices.
There is one more thing that needs mentioning. Ever since WaveLab 7, Steinberg has claimed that WL/WLE can use the plug-ins from Cubase.
This is not true, and the Cubase manual has nothing (that I’ve managed to find) to say about the subject.
I’m convinced that Steinberg isn’t giving away all those plug-ins for free. Their price is included in the price of Cubase/WaveLab. Therefore, I am not only being asked to pay for lots of unneeded features in order to obtain a usable CD authoring software. I am also expected to pay for the same products (plug-ins) twice. Do you really consider this an acceptable business practice?
If Steinberg is not interested in the potential revenue from the millions of midlevel studios, by releasing an Artist version of WaveLab, I have a couple of other suggestions.
Develop an “extension version” of WLP for Cubase (Pro), so that the WL features can be added to Cubase. The same way as the “missing” Cubase Pro features can be added to Nuendo.
Release a (heavily) discounted edition of WaveLab Pro for registered Cubase Pro users. After all, we have already paid for a large portion of WLP once (the vast majority of the plug-ins). Shouldn’t that be enough? If not, how many times do you think it’s acceptable to ask your customers to pay for the same software?
Please don’t take this as criticisms, but as positive suggestions that will benefit Steinberg as well as your customers/users.
So… 15th March is the release date… next Tuesday. Which means… wait until around Musikmesse until the launch-day bugs are ironed out.
I only got three request and I’d love to see a confirmation
FR1: I hope that “RMS Readout” was implemented in the “Batch Analyzer” (it’s only set up to drop ITU-R BS.1770-x specs)
FR2: Surround Editing/Rendering
FR3: better VST3 support (it’s still buggy!)
And I’d like to know if the Fraunhofer ProCodec is still part of WL9… I’m way too long with Steinberg to know that features are cut without warning or any further reasons.
I also fear that the “minimum requirements” for WL9 will be a bit through the roof as well. Seeing as Windows 10 is out now (fearing for the loss of Win7), and I don’t know what RAM WL9 wants to see as minimum this time around.
PG…with the release of Wavelab 9.0 imminent are you able to confirm that it will open Montages of previous versions (WL6, WL7, WL8.5)… since you know that many of us work with these earlier versions to retain functionalities and workflows which are absent or more difficult in the latest version ?
I would love to see the backup feature return. I still use Wavelab 6 to archive all my client files. Haven’t found a compression method more effective than OSQ. Why was the feature ever dropped?
Probably because hard drive space is cheap and there is no point on archiving something into a weird format that maybe only WL can unpack (not certain on that?) That sounds dangerous to me to be honest.
All my client files are BC WAV and backed up in three locations. No chance of not being able to read the files or worrying about an app disappearing from the market - along with the only way to decompress the files.
I also personally wouldn’t use a bundled file archiver. When a project is done I simply back up the folder for each project on a hard disk and mirror that with Carbon Copy Cloner and the disks are kept in two different locations.
Even if WaveLab is one day not existent, I still have access to all the assets in a generic way to work from.
I could see using the archiver if backing up to DVD-R (maybe) but those days are long gone.
