Steinberg WaveLab Pro 12

Steinberg introduce a huge number of enhancements and refinements to their flagship audio editing and mastering platform.

Steinberg’s WaveLab has been with us for nearly 30 years. For the initial release, designer and developer Philippe Goutier’s intention was to provide a powerful audio editor platform for those working with the new (at the time) sampler technology. However, over subsequent releases, WaveLab’s feature list has adapted to support a wide range of additional application areas and the software now provides a very sophisticated cross‑platform (macOS and Windows) audio editing and mastering suite.

Of course, many current DAWs now include their own audio editing toolsets, and there are plenty of dedicated options for audio mastering, some of which are highly automated. Outside of WaveLab’s established professional user base, therefore, might some potential new users need convincing that they actually need a product like WaveLab Pro 12? Well, Steinberg are obviously keen to try, as this release offers an extensive list of new additions and refinements to what was already a substantial, feature‑rich application.

So, what’s new and tempting? Well, I can’t fill the whole issue of SOS, so I’ll focus here on my personal picks from the Pro 12 headlines. Time to enter the ’Lab...

Assisted Management

WaveLab Pro 12 brings a whole host of workflow refinements. I’ll touch on some more of these later but two are worth mentioning from the off: the new Startup Assistant and some high‑level project management options.

The Startup Assistant concept will be familiar to Cubase users. Automatically popping open when you launch WaveLab, it provides instant and easy access to any recently used Projects, Audio Montages, Audio Editor files or Batch Processing tasks, as well as your templates, audio connection settings, software documentation and online resources. Personally, I find this a very useful time‑saver, but it can be deactivated if you prefer, or opened manually from the File menu at any time.

Enabled by some changes to the underlying project file structures, this release also brings some very welcome project management enhancements. The obvious highlight is the ability to create a backup of an entire Project, or a specific Audio Montage, to a new, consolidated, folder or to a ZIP archive. This is immensely useful as it ensures that copies of all the individual media files used with the Project or Montage are gathered together in a single location. Whether for data security, or to move a WaveLab session to another computer system, this brings both peace of mind and a streamlined workflow.

Differentiation & Integration

While there are clearly differences between the primary functions of WaveLab and your typical DAW, close integration between these two platforms is undoubtedly desirable. WaveLab 12 brings two significant refinements on this front. First, in both the Pro and Elements versions, there are new options to drag and drop or copy/paste audio selections from WaveLab to other applications. What’s more, this can be done with, or without, effects applied to the selected audio within WaveLab.

Second, WaveLab Pro 12 can now be used via ARA within a suitable host, giving you access to WaveLab’s sophisticated audio editing toolset directly within your DAW. Support for Cubase 13, Nuendo 13, Reaper 7 and Studio One 6.5 are already approved and, while it ought to be expected, my experience in testing this within Cubase Pro 13 was very smooth.

It Might Get Loud

While most of the audio world is thankfully past the worst excesses of the loudness wars, creating appropriate loudness properties within an audio project can still be a complex task. WaveLab Pro 12 brings a number of significant new and refined options on this front.

First, new numerical and visual loudness analysis tools are available for both audio files and Montages under the Analyze tab. As shown for an Audio Montage example, the Loudness button opens a dialogue letting you generate a numerical analysis of either selected clips or the whole Montage, as well as audio held within a Reference Track. The user can customise the contents of the report and decide whether to view the absolute values or the differences compared to one of several standard targets (presets include Spotify, Netflix, EBU R128 and YouTube, amongst others, and you can also create your own custom targets). If you need to generate loudness reports (for example, to demonstrate compliance with a specific broadcast standard), the Export button then lets you do just that.

The new visual loudness analysis options are also very informative, including the identification of different types of loudness hotspots.

The Visual Analysis button provides similar loudness data in a visual format by superimposing curves for your selected loudness parameters over the clip’s waveform display. Note that, located bottom left, this dialogue includes both Analyze vs Analyze Rendering options, allowing you to see two sets of curves, one for the original clip and one representing the clip’s loudness as it would be rendered with any currently active processing applied. A ‘difference’ plot is also available. There is all sorts of interesting and genuinely useful functionality here. For example, you can opt to show loudness ‘hotspots’ (represented by triangle markers of various colours along the waveform to indicate their location) and a number of these then offer a small speaker icon. A single click then allows you to audition (and carefully listen to) just the regions around these hotspots.

Second, automatic loudness matching between your processed clips and a specified reference source is now available on playback, with either your clip or the reference able to serve as the loudness ‘master’. This can serve a number of purposes, but the obvious use cases would be to compare your track in its mastered form with the unmastered version, or to compare your track with a favourite commercial release in the same genre. The automatic loudness adjustment means that, on playback, you can better judge just what your processing is doing to the dynamics or tonality of the sound while avoiding any confusion caused by ‘louder is better’. In addition, the Audio Montage’s Loudness Meta Normalizer has a number of new presets for adjusting the loudness of multiple clips within a project relative to one another, and also options to normalise peak levels via gain adjustments at either/both the Audio Montage output and Master Section output.

WaveLab Pro 12 can provide comprehensive numerical analysis of loudness data for your audio.

There is plenty to be gleaned across the numerical and visual feedback generated here, and the ease with which peak loudness can be set to your desired target is incredibly useful. No, there is no AI offering you starting points to refine the loudness outcome of your mastering signal chain, but all these new tools do enable you to make more informed mastering choices (or to revisit some mix decisions) if you have a specific loudness standard to hit. Equally, if you are looking to match the loudness characteristics of a commercial reference track, these tools will give you all the feedback you need to steer your processing towards that. This is genuinely useful stuff and, for me at least, an absolute highlight of this release.

Hear The Difference

Loudness matching isn’t WaveLab Pro 12’s only enhancement when it comes to ‘hearing the difference’, with three new features that might fall into this broad type of functionality. First, within the Audio Montage’s Output section of the Inspector, you now have five frequency bands (with customisable crossover points) available that can be soloed during playback. This provides yet another way to compare your own clips to a favourite reference track and I found it particularly useful for evaluating the nature and level of the low end in my own mixes.

Second, the Audio Montage now has a new Null Test Track feature. Playback from this track is polarity‑inverted and then mixed with the Montage output. If you import a rendered version of your track to the Null Test Track, and align it with the unprocessed version, on playback, assuming all the processing that is configured for the unrendered version is functioning correctly, they should cancel, resulting in silence (null). The process is helpful for quality assurance or troubleshooting any problematic plug‑ins. The practicalities are made easier thanks to the inclusion of automatic tools to ensure sample‑accurate clip alignment.

Third, if you work with multiple studio monitoring configurations, it’s now possible to link specific Master Section plug‑in chains with specific speaker sets. This might be particularly useful for those using software‑based room correction where different EQ correction might be required for each speaker set.

Best Of The Rest

The above selection of personal highlights aside, v12 brings a whole host of other new and improved features, so I’ll finish with some additional honourable mentions. For example, the new Rainbow Waveform display mode, while also simply looking cool, provides useful visualisation of the frequency content within a clip’s waveform display. This is fully customisable and includes presets (and user presets) for particular tasks such as identifying audio sections dominated by frequencies typical of sibilance, muddy midrange, or with high degrees of low‑end dominance.

Working via ARA, the full WaveLab Pro 12 editing and analysis experience — including the new Rainbow Waveform display showing here — integrates very smoothly with a suitable host.

WaveLab Pro 12 also includes a selection of new plug‑ins — Black Wave, VoxComp, Raiser, EQ‑P1A, EQ‑M5, and SampleAlign — many of which will be familiar to Cubase users. The TestGenerator plug‑in has also been revamped. Incidentally, on the plug‑in front, as a useful workflow enhancer, the Audio Montage now lets you easily copy settings from one instance of a specific plug‑in to other instances of the same plug‑in.

This release also adds options for automatic transient markers, with the ability to snap to these markers when making selections and to navigate through a waveform from one transient marker to the next. Other visual aids include options for automatic vertical zoom on a waveform based upon the waveform’s amplitude, synchronisation of scrolling and zooming across multiple audio files and/or Montages, and the ability to zoom in/out while making an audio selection are now also available. New crossfade options improve that area of workflow. For Windows users, a new built‑in Steinberg ASIO driver is available. Finally, the CD Window is now termed the Album Window and, amongst the tweaks here, there is now an option to play both track starts and ends, making it easy to audition the gaps between individual tracks as well as their start and end characteristics.

Conclusions

Original developer Philippe Goutier has described WaveLab as the Swiss Army knife of audio processing and editing. It’s a perfectly valid analogy but, having reached v12, if you owned a Swiss Army knife that contained as many tools as WaveLab, I suspect you would need several members of a Swiss Army to carry it around. WaveLab Pro 12 is a fully equipped virtual laboratory for the analysis, editing and processing of audio.

WaveLab is used by a number of different user groups — music producers, mastering engineers, sound designers, audio editors for film/TV, forensic audio experts and more — and these established users will be able to draw their own conclusions about where the value lies to them in the impressive list of refinements. However, I do think a few additional words aimed at potential new users are worth making. WaveLab Pro 12 is undoubtedly a powerful, feature‑rich, audio laboratory. However, while Steinberg have continued to do a great job in making the workflow efficient, things can — and do — get deep pretty quickly. That’s not a criticism of any sort; it’s simply a statement of the reality. If you want to have surgical control over almost every aspect of your audio, you need a compressive and surgical toolkit. WaveLab Pro 12 provides exactly that; it’s powerful and feature‑rich, but it pulls no punches.

WaveLab Pro 12 is simply the best professional audio editing environment on the market by a considerable distance.

Personally, I think that’s a very good thing. Yes, designing software that makes specific complex tasks accessible to any user level certainly has its place, but it requires considerable skill on behalf of the developer if it is also to satisfy more experienced users. While the workflow enhancements in this new WaveLab release are all welcome, hats off to the development team for resisting the temptation to dilute the WaveLab experience. For some tasks, surgical, powerful tools are still needed and, in this reviewer’s opinion, WaveLab Pro 12 is simply the best professional audio editing environment on the market by a considerable distance.