I am about to embark on mastering an album. I thought I would take a look at Wavelab as they have an extended elements trial. My initial impression is that the elements version might be too cut down. Only three tracks in the montage, no batch processing etc.
So I have all my tracks layed out in Cubase which I can create mastering fx chains on and do all the fades etc. I was wondering if there is something WL elements can add to the workflow, I know you can open into WL from Cubase. Can you make non destructive edits this way? Is there some metering I can take advantage of?
I’ll give you a very simple answer. I’ve been using Wavelab for many years… maybe over 20 years. I love it, and can’t imagine not using it.
A real mastering engineer does many things:
He’s a different set of ears that can hear your album more objectively.
He listens to your album as a whole. You hear every nuance of every song, but maybe you have a hard time seeing the big picture.
He does the technical work of producing a proper CD.
For you, opening your mixdown into wavelab will help you see the album as a whole, and because you aren’t seeing all the tracks, maybe you will have a better chance at seeing the big picture.
Do those simple things make the cost of Wavelab worth it to you? For me, it does.
There’s a million other things the full version of Wavelab does that I can’t live without. But most people don’t need that.
In addition to Jay M, I think you can “get by” with just 3 montage tracks, but remember with the new WL10 you also get reference tracks too.
For mastering, I don’t see batch processing as a loss. It’s a wonderful for other tasks, but would an ME who is finalizing your tracks use it often?
There is lots of metering. But always use your ears not your eyes. My favorite eye-candy to this day is the 3D frequency analysis even though that’s not metering. There are lots of analysis tools in WL because it’s a mastering environment while Cubase is a production environment.
In one sense, you can master in any DAW. But WL is tailored to mastering and makes things much easier offering lots of features not found in any DAW. Look up Smart Bypass. Check out all the analysis and error correction tools.