Mastering is the process of trying to make audio sound as good as possible on any playback device, and most pro studios have at least two sets of speakers you can use to try to achieve this. There are also advanced spectrographic and other meters available, enabling you to analyse any aspect of your signal. If you work professionally and need to submit audio for broadcast in various formats, getting maximum volume while remaining within industry limits is crucial, and these tools enable you to do that. First up are a number of additions to the already excellent audio analysis and metering tools in the form of EBU R128-compliant loudness metering with True Peak support and a dedicated loudness graph.
What’s New? WaveLab 8 has inherited some of the latest features from Cubase and Nuendo, which is not surprising given that they’re developed by the same company. It’s quite heavy on small buttons and icons, although there are tooltips to tell you what each one does and you do become familiar with them over time. There are window sets that you can configure and zap between, so it’s easy to move, for instance, from montage mode (which you might use to stitch together a radio show) to batch processing mode, where you could be removing the hiss from a bunch of files. Regardless of platform, WaveLab has a single-window interface, inside which you can dock and undock tabs and move sections quite freely, so you have a lot of control over your layout. As a result it might feel slightly alien to Mac users, though you can alter the theme to make it more Mac-like. WaveLab doesn’t look much like Steinberg’s other products and this is a result of its having been developed as a separate, PC-only application. The system requirements are pretty reasonable, thanks in part to the fact that you’re only ever going to be running audio effects, not instruments.
#Wavelab 8 license#
Although Cubase and other DAWs can do a lot of this kind of stuff, WaveLab does it better, and has many detailed tools that you won’t find in other applications.Īfter a fairly modest download you activate WaveLab online, and you’ll need a USB dongle to write the license to. It’s also very good at audio analysis and metering. It’s for audio editing, manipulation and processing and is geared towards things like creating podcasts or radio broadcasts and mastering albums. Although capable of multitrack audio recording, it’s not really aimed at music creation in the same way as Cubase is, lacking as it does support for MIDI or virtual instruments. Ride the Wave Before we get into what’s new it’s worth briefly recapping what WaveLab is for.