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.
-Tom