

It's window-specific (and so has far more buttons in the Montage window than in the Batch processor) and brings together many useful controls, including range selection and anchor points, as well as more obvious functions such as play and record. "The new Master Transport Panel brings together many useful controls, including range selection and anchor points" First, the new Master Transport Panel, which sits either above or below the waveform display. However, there are some new operational changes that are worth mentioning. WaveLab 8 remains largely unchanged from WaveLab 7 in terms of workflow and functionality. It's worth noting that this is available to the various Montage effects sections (clip, track and master), but not the overall Master Output section. On the subject of plugins, effects chains are now presented in a tabbed window, enabling you to add, remove and switch processors around all within the one panel.

CurveEQ is a Voxengo classic (also bundled with Cubase 7): a 64-band spline design that's about as flexible and easy to use as EQ plugins get. Particularly notable are the compressor's three sidechain options (low-pass, high-pass and band-pass, with adjustable cutoff and Q width), tube drive and mix balance control. Of the three new plugins, Brickwall Limiter is the most basic however, both Tube Compressor and CurveEQ are excellent. It's a good idea that we found worked pretty well. This aims to match the loudness of audio clips within an Audio Montage, either to the loudest clip or to a specific value. The most interesting new loudness-related feature is the Loudness Meta Normalizer. You can also customise the ranges and colours. The meters are highly configurable, with both EBU and custom scaling, and overall standardised presets (Classical R-128, for example). This is complemented by your more typical loudness meters, indicating momentary, short-term and integrated loudness (levels only), along with a handy histogram. "The Loudness Meta Normalizer matches the loudness of audio clips within an Audio Montage"
