
At least installation is straightforward, and the WaveLab online help is easy to navigate and well-written. WaveLab Pro 9.5 runs on Macs and PCs, provided you’ve plugged your licensing USB key in. Application: I was able to pick a word out the middle of a dense mix and copy it somewhere else, seamlessly. You can then extract, process and paste that audio. With a spectrogram displayed, you can select (with a rectangle) a section of audio that represents a span of time and limited range of frequencies.

Spectral editing is a mind-bender, but a potentially useful one. With certain types of problems, the repair is flawless. This examines audio around a glitch or dropout to replace the problem spot. Error correction can locate problems in an audio file and correct then with interpolation or even “audio inpainting”. If you need multiple audio files rendered in multiple formats, this will save you much time. Worthy of note are its batch processing features, which allow you to perform almost any function on a stack of audio files without human intervention. WaveLab has many other features-far too many to list here. The final result wasn’t perfect, but it was an impressive improvement. WaveLab’s active noise reduction algorithm learned the noise signature and removed enough of it to salvage the track. I torture-tested this feature with a spoken word track cursed with both the low-frequency hum of a pump and the high-frequency swish of running water in the background. WaveLab 9.5 offers a newly redesigned restoration plug-in, which handily reduces clicks, noise and hum from audio. When a DAW is overkill, WaveLab’s montage may be a good fit. It’s also great for layering effects, music and dialog for a video soundtrack. Montage won’t replace your DAW, but it can make quick and efficient work of floating a spoken word track over a music bed. The WaveLab “montage” mode allows mixing of multiple files with automation and effects. This process is less about what you hear and more about visual monitoring, and WaveLab shines in this regard as well. The final step in mastering involves rendering the file at the proper level, bit depth, sample rate and file format. Everything you need to finalize the perfect mono, stereo or surround file is here. standard level, loudness and spectral) visible at the same time. Metering is extensive, and you can have multiple meters (i.e. Also available is WaveLab Elements ($100) with a stripped-back feature set. clipping), eliminate noise, analyze and adjust spectral content, mix multiple tracks, perform batch processing and much more. This is not just about “filling the meters”-WaveLab also includes tools to correct problems in an audio file (i.e.

It allows you to optimize and process your final mix in countless ways, making it sound its very best no matter what device is playing it back. WaveLab is to a stereo file what a digital audio workstation (DAW) is to individual tracks.
Wavelab elements 8 review pro#
One such tool is Steinberg WaveLab Pro ($560), a powerful package that engineers have been using to put the finishing touches on audio for over 20 years.

This requires another realm of knowledge and completely different tools. Instead of comping multiple takes and dialing in reverbs, the focus changes to bit depth, dither, limiting, stereo image, headroom, sample rate conversion, file formats, final EQ…. If you want your final output to be its very best, you need to be as savvy wrangling just two tracks as you are 200. We work our magic and reduce all of those tracks, in most cases, to a simple stereo audio file. Those of us in the audio production world work with lots of channels: 80 inputs to our digital mixer, 64 streams recorded into the computer, hundreds of tracks for mixdown.
