Shortly after I started working at Nashville Public Radio (1993), we got an early version of SADiE, chosen because their US distributor was local. It served us well for a few years, but in 1997 as we moved into a brand new facility and upgraded a lot of equipment we decided to move to WaveLab. I think it was version 6. I used it (and versions 7 & 8) extensively there until I retired in 2022.

The one aspect of my old job that I kept after retirement was as the producer of the station’s only nationally distributed program, the weekly one-hour “Bluegrass Breakdown.” Truth be told, I didn’t trust anyone else to do the job to my satisfaction, so I’ve continued doing it on a volunteer basis. The program’s host, Dave Higgs, lives in a little town about an hour south of Nashville and I live in a medium-size town about half an hour north of Nashville. Dave gathers up the music for each episode and records his parts (he refuses to get a new computer, so he’s still using WaveLab 8) in his home studio and shoots the files to me. I edit, mix, and master it, then render and upload files in various formats for distribution. We’ve been doing this show since the days of analog tape, 30 years or so. It’s something that I’ve always taken a lot of pride in and I’m glad I didn’t give it up when I retired.

My old Mac had started to have some issues so I upgraded to a new one at the start of 2024 and upgraded to WaveLab 12 soon after. It looked pretty daunting at first but I’ve always caught on to new things pretty quickly and I soon came to realize that 12 was going to make our show a whole lot better and easier to produce to boot!

I also use WaveLab for voiceover work and a number of other personal projects, the nearest to my heart being digitizing music from a lifetime of record collecting. There’s still an amazing amount of stuff that’s never been reissued in any digital format (I’m looking at you, “Buckingham Nicks”) and, while I still buy vinyl, I like the convenience of being able to play whatever I want to hear from a hard drive.

Side story. A moderately successful Nashville songwriter had a short-lived band back in the early '80s and they put out one EP. I always liked it and it was one of the first things I remastered with WaveLab and burned to a CD once I had the capability to do so. Years later we had that person in the studio to do some songs for a show called “The Songwriter Sessions.” (Don’t look for it; it went away several years ago.) I brought that CD in and had it playing as we were setting up the studio. This artist heard it and asked if we still had a turntable in the studio. The answer was yes, but I told him it was a CD. He looked confused and said it had never been issued on CD. I explained that I had a copy on CD, a nicely remastered copy if I did say so myself. He listened in surprise for a few seconds and finally said, “That sounds really good. Can I get a copy of this?”