Recording - February 2020 - 55

process; I never cared for how WaveLab
handled the analog routing. Still, I loved
the WaveLab montage for assembling final masters and rendering all the various
master formats needed for a given project.
In WaveLab 10, you can now play audio from one track in the montage, route
it to your analog mastering chain, and record it back onto another track. You can
even simultaneously feed more than one
stereo output to different D/A converter
options to compare on your mastering console, as well as enjoy the option of monitoring the analog inserts on your mastering
console or monitor controller. You can even
toggle between more than one stereo input
record path to seamlessly compare your
A/D converter options in real time and
choose what's best for the song or project.

External effects flexibility

WaveLab has had the ability to route
audio to and from analog equipment for
several versions now, with the External
FX plugin. This plugin was annoyingly
only available in the global master section. Not anymore! In WaveLab 10, you
can use the External FX plugin anywhere

in the audio montage, including Clip
FX, which is a plugin chain that can be
inserted directly on a selection, rather
than on a track or the master section.
This opens up a myriad of creative routing possibilities depending on how you
like to work.

Increased plugin flexibility

You can now have plugins on each audio clip (or the output track) before going
analog with your signal. If you want to
monitor (but not print) a limiter after the
capture from digital, this is also possible.
I prefer to capture without a limiter, so I
have the flexibility for revisions, alternate
versions (such as vinyl pre-master), or just
to have an archive of the master that isn't
peak limited. The ability to monitor the
limiter without printing it is very nice.

Reference Track

Another great new feature is the Reference Track. Reference Tracks are used
to send audio to multiple simultaneous
D/A paths (as described above) but
they have perhaps a more useful purpose; the Reference Track can be used

to quickly toggle between versions of
a track for comparison-a different,
already-mastered song on the same album, or perhaps a rough master from
the mix engineer, or to hear alternate
processing on the mix bus that was removed before mastering, and so on.
The Reference Track also has a solo
function that bypasses any existing processing in the montage, so your reference and alternate tracks are not additionally processed by your mastering
chain. The Reference Track allows you
to quickly hear and compare the untouched reference file right in your session. I've been using Reference Track a
lot in cases where I have to match up
my master sequence to a mockup that
the artist or producer has provided for
song transitions. The Reference Track
gives you excellent visual and audible
feedback, very elegantly and quickly.

Plays nice with others

WaveLab has had built-in spectral
editing for a while now, but with the
recent acquisition of SpectraLayers by
Steinberg, there needed to be a way to

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Recording - February 2020

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