LongWaveStudio said:
some company sent me the first version of T-Racks to review it and see if i wanted to use it in the studio. I played with it for about one hour and sent it back saying i didn't want anything to do with it.
it claims some analog warmth gets added. bull. you get a few valves which light up and change colour. the compressor was disgusting, the limiter had a horrible artifact , the only thing which was ok, was the eq. and that wasn't very comprehensive.
sonusman, true, wavelab is not good enough for "mastering", but im sure you'll agree with me in the fact that it is something that can always be upgraded and manipulated better than T-racks.
It's either wavelab, or I must admit, sound forge has worked quite well as well, the new version 5. the benefit of both packages is, you can edit onto the wave itself in a better way. ill give you a quick example...
yesterday, i had to make a radio edit for a client. so i put the track into Soundforge, found the points to be editied, zoomed into find the exact points of the beat, did a little crossfading, deleted the sections i didn't need. done. the track was edited, ready to be mastered. to do edits like that is so easy, and you cant do it with T-Racks.
Wavelab or Soundforge (sonic foundry) can be bought in most respected music shops, i guess. Maybe a little more expensive to T-Racks, but there are obvious reasons for that
i bought wavelab originally, just for the analysis features. so thats one good reason to buy it. you can check phase, frequency graphs, allsorts. im sure it will educate you in someway if you are new to mastering.
sonusman, which waves plug ins do you like? i must admit, i hate plugins, but ive been impressed with a couple of waves' stuff.
-Romesh
Romesh, I hope you didn't get the impression that I was knocking Wavelab! LOL.... It is what I have and use it shamelessly! My comment about "barely adequate" has more to do with the fixed 24 bit internal processing. The "featues" of the application are quite staight ahead and more than adequate.
About the only Waves plug I find myself using over and over is the L1. I have been starting to like the C1 Compressor on certain things, but it just falls a tad short is really giving me that "roundness" I want when I use a compressor over a mix. I don't particularly care for their EQ's over a mix. I use Steinberg's
QMetric, and that is a parametric EQ that is hard to beat. It uses "double sample rate" processing, which is sort of like increasing the internal bit depth as I understand it. I like how transparent the sound is, and how "real life" the interface is. No funny graph stuff to deal with, just turn some cyber knobs....
I am beside myself to understand how somebody will go and spend the money on a "solution", even after many professional engineers advised that there is a better way to go for the long run.
The facts remain:
1 - Wavelab and T-racks are very close to the same price.
2 - Wavelab contains NATIVELY eq and compression modules that are comparable to T-racks
3 - Wavelab allows waveform editing and T-racks doesn't.
4 - Wavelab supports third party plugin's. T-racks doesn't.
5 - Wavelab offers a CD authoring sub-application that works with many of the most popular CDR burners. You can also print a PQ Timesheet for a duplication house from the program if they require one with your "mastered" disk.
6 - T-racks will probably NEVER offer the above features! One day, there could be a T-racks Direct X and/or VST plugin that you can use in Wavelab!!!
7 - Only an idiot would pay money for T-racks when something like Wavelab is available!!!
Now shackrock, I can't spend your money for you. But I can at least tell you when a fool and his money will be parted. Don't be a fool and trust a couple guys who have to slug out a living using these tools. If a couple of professional engineers advise a certain software that is comparable in price to what you are consider, and STRONGLY suggest that you DON'T purchase what you are considering, you should be counting your lucky stars that such help was provided to you for free!
You just can't get over how "cool" the T-racks interface looks, and the many "endorsements" offered by people about it. The proof is in the pudding. You start COMPARING the audio that was processed in T-racks to what else is available, you start HEARING that it is not a very good solution.
Don't be so fucking hard headed and buy Wavelab.
Ed