EQ Magazine - January 2009 - (Page 57)

Wavelab Studio includes some excellent plug-ins, and most of the editing features of Wavelab, its big brother. The menu shows the extensive DSP processes; the master section offers six effects slots. Studio lacks the “higher end of the bell curve” features, like 64-bit floating point editing (it maxes out at 32-bit floating), no spectrum editing (an esoteric, but very useful, feature for advanced editing techniques), six master section slots instead of eight (four for Essential), limited “montage” (multitracking) features, only two output channels instead of eight, two effects maximum per track/clip instead of 10 (one for Essential), and a maximum of eight audio tracks and one video track— Wavelab has no limits on either. Essential does only two audio tracks. There’s no option to burn DVD-Audio, but with DVDAudio a fading format, this may be moot. You also won’t find sampler support or audio databasing. However, Studio can do both DVD-ROM and CD-ROM data backups— a feature I’ve found very useful with Wavelab. As to Essential, anything Studio can’t do, Essential can’t do either. Furthermore, it can’t apply editing to a selection, just a file; and for playback, unlike the others, it doesn’t offer variable speed, jog/shuttle, or a time display window. Audio CD burning is more basic (e.g., no support for Audio CD indexing), and it can’t import a CD image file. What you get that you didn’t expect: Studio contains a wealth of offline processors, lacking only pitch quantize, error detection/correction, effect morphing, and a pan normalizer compared to the full version. Realtime plug-ins are almost identical, less the high-res Apogee dithering (although the standard Apogee version is included), 192kHz resampling, and the ability to use plugins with externally-input audio or use external hardware as a plug-in. Surprisingly, Essential does almost as well as Studio although there is no Apogee dithering (only the “house brand”), no multiband compressor or ducker, and for offline processing, no loudness normalizer (only peak normalization). Also surprisingly, like its bigger brothers, Essential includes a video window for editing to picture and podcast creation functions. All Wavelabs support VST and DX plug-ins, Broadcast WAV files, and 24-bit resolution; for sample rate, Wavelab and Studio top out at 192kHz compared to Essential’s 96kHz, and Essential is limited to 2GB files whereas Wavelab and Studio support the w64 format for unlimited file lengths. The bottom line: Having two “lite” choices may seem to complicate matters, but a careful analysis shows each has its own uses. The full version of Wavelab is a program where no matter what you ask it to do, it’ll probably say “Yes, I can.” However, not everyone is going to ask a program to do DVD-Audio, 192kHz editing, multitrack “montage”-style editing, or take isolated noises out of a track via spectral editing. If you just need the basics—trim files, process them, and get them ready for prime time or podcasting— Essential will likely offer all you need, although the omission of a multiband compressor is something you’ll want to rectify for serious mastering. If you need a pro-level digital audio editor, unless you’re doing a variety of projects on an almost daily basis where you have no idea what people will throw at you, the Studio version will satisfy all but the most critical applications. www.steinberg.net BIAS PEAK LE 6 ($129) Peak LE—the junior version of the pre-eminent Mac digital audio editor—costs 20% as much as Peak Pro, and 10% the price of Peak Pro XT (which includes an additional collection of mastering-oriented plug-ins). But does the huge price difference also represent a big hit on functionality? Let’s find out by comparing LE to Peak Pro. What you don’t get: The main difference is no looping tools like Peak’s Loop Tuner (although you can loop selections, and nudge loop points). So if looping is a big part of what you do, Peak LE is not the droid you’re looking for. Also, resolution tops out at 24-bit/96kHz, as opposed to 32-bit/10MHz (not a misprint!). There are also a few file handling limitations: no batch processing, limited region export, generic MDA dither instead of BIAS’s cool DCAT and POW-r dithering, and no SMDI sample transfers. A bigger limitation is that editing is not RAM-based, but hard-drive based. For short files, this isn’t a big deal but with longer files, your hard drive will get a lot of exercise. As to plug-ins, there’s AU/VST support but LE doesn’t include the Vbox series/parallel matrix router, which is great for sophisticated editing. Also, there are only three (CONTINUED) www.eqmag.com JANUARY 2009 EQ 57 http://www.steinberg.net http://www.eqmag.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of EQ Magazine - January 2009

EQ Magazine - January 2009 Contents Talk Box Sounding Board Punch In Bob Dylan The Killers Guitar Trax Bass Management Key Issues Drum Heads Vocal Cords Mix Bus Cheat Sheet Microsoft Windows Vista Apple Mac OS X "Lite" Software Roundup "Lite" Software Gadgets & Goodies Sounds Room With a Vu

EQ Magazine - January 2009

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