MASTERING AT HOME WITH WAVELAB

Mastering with a conventional DAW can be a good way of working, but it has its shortcomings. The most significant of these is the way processors are applied as plug-ins on a track, with the need to continually save and load processor settings when moving between different songs in your collection or album.

You can work around this by bouncing processed songs/stems into new files as you work through an album, only re-loading the settings if you decide a tweak is needed at a later point. But this is still cumbersome, and can become quite a handful when mastering from stems.

Thankfully, there is a DAW designed specifically with mastering in mind and which can completely side-step these sorts of problems. Originally released by Steinberg in 1995, WaveLab has grown to become the de facto DAW for audio mastering. It looks unlike most DAWs