They allow you to seamlessly toggle between your material and a reference without the introduction of pops, clicks, or other artifacts.įor mastering singles, ADPTR AUDIO’s Metric AB plugin handles reference tracks phenomenally.
#WAVELAB 6 DDP PRO#
Reference tracks are a brand new feature in Wavelab Pro 10 that allow you to hear how your songs stack up against commercial releases. While mastering, this level of accessible power is awesome. When you save the RX session, the file is instantly updated in Wavelab. If you split a track into different clips consisting of the intro, verses, pre-choruses, and choruses, you can copy and paste processing to them with very little fuss.įor damaged recordings that require restoration, Wavelab Pro 10 allows you to highlight a clip and quickly open it within an external audio editor like iZotope RX. It’s possible to toggle plugins on and off at different points in a song, using Ableton or Logic, but this can be rather time consuming. It’s quite common to process the chorus or drop in a song differently than the verses or buildups. While mastering, this is a particularly important ability to have. Clip ProcessingĪlmost any DAW is going to allow you to apply plugins to tracks, but not every DAW allows you to apply plugins to clips.
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Unlike iTunes and Spotify, Netflix will actually reject your submission if the audio synced with the video doesn’t meet their LUFS requirements.įigure 1: Wavelab Pro 10’s Loudness Meta Normalizer. In this situation, it would make sense to normalize all the tracks on the album to a similar LUFS value.Īnother instance in which hitting LUFS targets is important is when you’re mixing audio for a streaming service like Netflix. Mastering an album is a little different because if one song is hitting -14 LUFS and another is hitting -6 LUFS, that’s a clear sign that the songs have been mixed very differently and although the loudness algorithms they get hit with should normalize them, they’re still going to sound very different from one another.Īlso, if you were to burn these tracks to a CD, the track clocking in at -6 LUFS would sound drastically louder than the -14 LUFS track since there’s no LUFS normalization process that takes place automatically. The whole point of loudness normalization is that your song should sound just as loud as everything else, so there’s no point in maximizing loudness at the expense of audio quality. The normalization processes applied by streaming services will do their thing and there’s not much to worry about. When mastering a single, your best bet is to compress the track to a point that sounds subjectively “good,” then release it as is.
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There’s definitely something to be said about heavily compressing a song as a stylistic choice, but that’s another discussion altogether. Songs above these values are attenuated, making it pointless to make songs loud for the sake of being loud. Amazon Music, Spotify, and Tidal play back songs at -14 LUFS, and YouTube plays back audio at -13 LUFS. It matches the loudness of all your clips to either the loudest clip you’ve selected, or a target LUFS value.Ĭurrently, Apple Music with Soundcheck activated plays back tracks at -16 LUFS. Wavelab Pro 10 provides a solution to this problem with its Loudness Meta Normalizer feature. Mastering an EP is doable within a basic DAW, but when you’re working on an album containing 12-20+ songs, you’ll end up wasting hours dealing with LUFS levels. Trying to hit target LUFS values across multiple tracks is a nightmare tweaking the settings of all your compressors and limiters is extremely time consuming. If you’ve ever tried to master more than one song in an Ableton or Logic session, you’re familiar with how chaotic the process is. Many engineers charge a flat mastering fee instead of billing by the hour what more incentive do you need to streamline your mastering workflow? 1. The less time you need to spend mastering, the more masters you can get done. Study their features, and how they compare, try trials, don't be a dick and pirate.In general, a mastering DAW is going to increase the speed at which you’re capable of producing masters. I think you are most likely looking for a DAW, which would be the next logical step up from garageband and should be sufficient for some time to come. I'd say for a real mastering engineer, the specialized tools and concentrated workflow of Wavelab would be beneficial, but money out the window for anyone who didn't know what to do with it.Īs a rule of thumb I'd say know what you need, what's included in the software, and how that is going to help you better than a competitors product.
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If not than some dynamics processing and equalization on the master bus of your track in your DAW will be sufficient. I would say if you plan on making a commercial release and can afford it, send your mixes to a Mastering Engineer (Who may or may not use something like Wavelab).