Emagic's Waveburner CD‑writing package has grown to incorporate new editing features and powerful plug‑in support, but retains its intuitive user interface. Paul White tests the new, improved version.
Emagic's Audiowerk 2 Production Kit, reviewed in SOS in July 1999, introduced both the Audiowerk 2 audio card and Waveburner, a newly developed application for compiling and burning audio CDs. They've now launched a new and improved version of the latter as a separately available application. Waveburner Pro is a Mac‑only audio CD‑burning application designed for compiling individual songs into a finished album, and is capable of producing Red Book CDs complete with copy prohibit, UPC/EAN and track ISRC codes where required. CDs burned using Waveburner Pro can be used as production masters by many CD duplicating houses. Waveburner Pro also supports CD Text for adding album names, track names, performer/artiste names, composer, arranger and messages.
The editing side of Waveburner Pro is still in many ways less comprehensive than that of other programs as it's mainly designed to deal with completed songs rather than to 'assemble edit' songs from bits of alternative takes (though this is possible with care). However, it does provide an intuitive audio manipulation environment, the ability to create level changes, fades and crossfades, and now has support for VST plug‑ins. Furthermore, a bundled suite of mastering plug‑ins now provides multi‑band compression, limiting, EQ and denoising.
Installation is from a CD‑ROM and the copy protection requires the CD‑ROM to be placed in the drive when prompted, every three months or so. To use Waveburner Pro you'll need a Power Macintosh computer running Mac OS 8.6 or higher and at least 16Mb of free RAM. For any serious real‑time plug‑in use, a G3 should be considered the practical minimum. Stereo audio files at the CD sample rate of 44.1kHz will also take up between 700Mb and 1Gb of drive space per album project — and you'll require twice that if you need to create a disk image prior to CD burning. You'll also need a CD burner (a list of supported drives is available on the Emagic web site at www.emagic.de) and, although you can record and play back via the Mac's own audio I/O, you'll need a soundcard (ideally with a digital input) for any serious work. Direct support is included for the Emagic Audiowerk 2 and Audiowerk 8 cards, and support has now been added for ASIO‑ and EASI‑compatible hardware; there's also an included EASI driver that allows Digidesign hardware to be used via Direct I/O. I used this in conjunction with a Digidesign Pro Tools Mix 24 system for my tests.
Chop And Change
A selection of Waveburner Pro's bundled plug‑ins: the multi‑band compressor, Fat EQ and limiter.
Audio may be recorded directly into Waveburner Pro at 44.1kHz only, or it may be imported from other applications in SDII (mono, interleaved or split), AIFF or WAV formats at bit depths from 8 to 24 and sample rates of up to 96kHz. Waveburner Pro can also convert MP3 files to 16‑bit, 44.1kHz files. Existing files may be added via an Add File menu or you can drag and drop directly from the finder to the List window, and any material not at 44.1kHz is automatically sample‑rate converted by the program. Waveburner can be used at 16‑bit or 24‑bit resolution — at the end of the process, 24‑bit files are reduced to 16‑bit using dither to maintain low‑level linearity.
Once audio is in Waveburner Pro, it may be viewed graphically as a waveform and can be chopped into regions using a scissors tool. Material from DAT or similar sources initially appears as a single region within the Waveform and List windows, whereas imported SDII‑format audio files that already have SDII regions within them are automatically separated into Waveburner Pro regions unless this function is disabled in the Preferences menu. Region start and end points may be trimmed, regions may be moved in time relative to each other and crossfades between overlapping regions can be created. Region levels may be changed (per channel if necessary) and CD Track Start Markers can be added at any position. By default, track start IDs are automatically created at the start of each newly created region, though it's possible to have several CD tracks within one audio region or several regions comprising one audio track — you can even put track starts in the middle of a crossfade if you need to. You just add or remove track start ID markers as necessary.
The main work area of Waveburner Pro is the Waveform display, where audio is viewed as two parallel sets of stereo tracks. The reason there are two sets of tracks is to allow region overlaps to be viewed in a meaningful manner. When a continuous file is sliced up into regions, the regions appear alternatively in the upper and lower sections of the window as shown in the screenshot, above left. A transport control bar resides below the main waveform displays, and below this is a smaller overview waveform for the entire CD project. Pressing the Record button brings up the record window.
Time scales are marked along the top and bottom of the window and the main waveform display may be zoomed in both time and amplitude dimensions via the Zoom icons in the toolbars. Time may be displayed as frames (SMPTE‑style), time or samples, and track IDs and indices are shown directly below the upper time scale bar. Indices, which are supported only by some CD players, are shown as diamonds and may be named. Track start and pause markers are shown as triangles and both types of marker have a line below them that extends across the waveform display. A CD player‑style display at the left of the screen shows the track numbers, indices and real time location.
Where tracks are dragged so that they overlap, the track start marker is placed at the centre of the crossfade region, though it can of course be moved or deleted. Where regions don't overlap, the pause marker is located at the end of the first region and the start marker at the beginning of the second region. Double‑clicking on a region opens a dialogue box that shows all the region data numerically, including its start and stop trim values, the fade‑in and out times, and any left and right gain changes that have been made. Regions may also be trimmed in the Waveform window by dragging the start and end markers.
Most operations are non‑destructive, so that even when files are cut into regions and the regions moved around, the original audio file remains unchanged. However, audio can be normalised to bring its loudest peak up to digital full scale, and if several regions are selected at once, they will all be scaled by the same amount so that the loudest peak in whatever region it happens to reside is at digital full scale.
During audio playback, a stereo level meter shows the signal level along with a numerical readout of the remaining headroom. Peak level data is stored along with the overview file, which means that Waveburner Pro always knows where the loudest peak in a region or sound file occurs. An audio level envelope line may be dragged to change levels or to adjust fade lengths and shapes, but if the level is increased to the point where clipping will occur somewhere in the file, it turns red as a warning, while if the audio is normalised, it shows purple. A blue line indicates that the peak value of the region has not yet been read while a green line shows that the audio levels have been read and are below 0dB peak. Note that clipping that occurs within a chain of plug‑ins (due to boosting within individual plug‑ins) won't necessarily be detected, but a plug‑in level meter can be inserted anywhere into a plug‑in chain if you need to check this.
Playback from the current cursor position can be started and stopped using the space bar, and as soon as a new region is created (by cutting an existing region), it displays grab handles for length, level and fade adjustment. Track start markers may be dragged to new positions by simply grabbing the 'head' of the marker; alternatively, if the line below the marker is dragged instead, the track pause and start markers are moved together. If you change a gap length near the beginning of an album, all the tracks ahead of the one you're working on move up, so you don't have to worry about changing edits or track spacings you fixed up earlier. Moving the cursor through the overview waveform makes it easy to start playback at any point within a file, and Emagic's familiar 'running man' catch button can be used to ensure that the displayed waveform is always at the cursor position. With catch active, the screen scrolls each time the cursor reaches the right‑hand side of the screen.
Track List
Though pretty much everything can be done in the Waveform window, Waveburner Pro also features a Track List window which displays the numerical and text information associated with the various tracks in a more familiar playlist form. Key commands may be used to play back individual tracks and new additions can be made to the playlist by dragging and dropping files from the Mac's Finder or by creating new regions in the Waveform editor window. Edits may also be viewed and adjusted numerically in this view, but in most instances, working in the Waveform view is easier and more intuitive for everything other than text entry.
Processing
Once the audio has been assembled in the desired order, it may be processed using the included plug‑ins (see box on previous page) and/or any suitable third‑party VST plug‑ins. An excellent feature is that you can choose to apply plug‑in processing to specific regions as well as to entire album projects, so if you need different settings or even completely different processing for each song, you can have it provided that your CPU can power all the plug‑ins you need to use. If you don't have enough CPU power to do everything in one go, there's a 'bounce' facility that lets you save regions, or even whole projects with all the processing made permanent. Once plug‑ins have been set up, the completed album may be saved as a disk image file complete with all processing. It is possible to burn CDs directly without first creating a disk image, but this can sometimes lead to problems, especially with slower computers.
Using Waveburner Pro
Waveburner Pro is extremely easy to use, and effective provided that your songs need no waveform‑level editing such as click removal, surgical cutting and pasting or other destructive processes — if you need editing of this kind, it must be carried out in another program first.
Both recording and importing audio is trivially easy, and dragging existing files from the desktop to the List window is one of the most straightforward ways to work if you've already recorded your audio using another program. Should a song need patching up (for example, by combining sections from two or more different mixes), it can be done, but getting the timing of the section transitions spot on requires a certain amount of trial and error. For example, there are no 'loop and nudge' windows of the kind you find in Sound Designer II, BIAS Peak or TC Spark. Where you do need to make such an edit, a short crossfade usually works best.
However, Waveburner Pro makes simple cut‑and‑drag editing very intuitive — most jobs get done by simply grabbing something and dragging it somewhere else! In a typical album project, the main jobs are creating and trimming regions, applying fades to the ends of regions, getting the right gaps between songs and, occasionally, crossfading songs, after which you might want to tweak the levels or stereo balance of individual tracks before applying processing such as compression, limiting and EQ. A test session involving all these processes took around 20 minutes from importing my audio to getting ready to burn a trial album of eight tracks, including some crossfades.
Playing safe, I created a disk image file before attempting to burn a CD, but when I reopened this in Waveburner and entered the CD‑burning dialogue window, there was a pre‑ticked check box that said 'Create Disk Image First?' As it was a disk image I was using, I felt the program should have recognised this fact and unticked the box for me, but it's not a problem once you know about it. After that, I had the choice of changing the burn speed and of making a test burn in simulation mode. I did both, and a 2x speed simulation run confirmed everything was OK. After that, burning the CD was a one‑button operation.
Verdict
Waveburner Pro is one of those 'Does what it says on the tin' programs, and is a lot more straightforward to use than most CD‑burning programs of its type. It isn't a full‑blown audio editor, but for creating a mastered album from one or more audio files of ready‑mixed songs, it's a doddle. I particularly like the sensible way in which track start IDs can be placed where you want them by dragging, and the system for creating crossfades between tracks would be difficult to improve upon. Having the ability to use VST plug‑ins both on individual tracks is something I've wanted for a long time, and being able to use other plug‑ins on the complete album at the same time also makes a lot of sense. The included plug‑ins are pretty good, aside from the slightly disappointing noise‑reduction, and the program supports more up‑to‑date CD burners than the majority of its competitors. Waveburner Pro would be a good choice for burning audio CDs on any Mac‑based system.
Bundled Plug‑ins
In Waveburner Pro, plug‑in processing is accessed via a dedicated plug‑in window which provides a choice of where the plug‑ins are placed in the signal path. The choices are Mix or any individual region, and plug‑ins (or combinations of plug‑ins) may be copied from one region's plug‑in window to another along with their settings where necessary. A practical example of the separate mix and region processing facilities might be the use of a single limiter over the whole mix, but different EQ and multi‑band compressor settings for individual regions.
Though the bundled plug‑ins function like VST plug‑ins, they are actually part of the program so can't be used in other applications — even Logic — which is a shame. My feeling is that bona fide owners of both Waveburner Pro and Logic Audio should be able to use either set of plug‑ins in either application. As standard VST plug‑ins may also be employed, the user potentially has access to some excellent dedicated mastering plug‑ins from third‑party companies such as Waves, DUY and TC Works.
Because plug‑ins use a significant amount of processing power, when used in real time they can slow down the disc‑writing procedure to the point where write errors occur. This is one reason why Waveburner Pro has the ability to create a disk image file of the entire CD with all edits, fades and effects made permanent. However, on slower computers, it may be impossible to run all the real‑time plug‑ins you need even if you're not burning a disc, hence the facility to bounce regions or files to disk, again making any plug‑in processing permanent. Using the bounce feature, processing using plug‑ins can be successfully completed in stages, even on relatively slow computers.
Waveburner's bundled plug‑ins are a multi‑band compressor, an equaliser based on the Fat EQ found in Logic Audio, a de‑noising device, a stereo width expander, a limiter and an additional level meter that can be inserted amongst the plug‑ins to diagnose clipping problems. The basic compressor is much the same as the one supplied with Logic Audio, but the multi‑band compressor is a brand new plug‑in that can provide separately adjustable compression in up to four frequency bands. The levels of the bands can be individually adjusted, and downwards expansion is included for cleaning up low‑level noise during pauses. Pretty much everything is adjustable including the crossover frequencies, compression ratios, thresholds and time constants, and there also some more advanced features such as a continuously adjustable Peak/RMS control, look‑ahead, and a sophisticated graphical display.
The de‑noising device is another newcomer that works on multiple frequency bands, much like Digidesign's DNR. The main difference is that it can't learn noise prints, so you need to experiment with the settings on a section of audio file that contains only noise before applying it to an entire album or region. Use this plug‑in with care, as anything other than expert setting up will result in the dreaded 'chirping' or 'glass noise' as the expanders in the various frequency bands open and close. Whereas the multi‑band compression, EQ and limiting plug‑ins perform very well, the noise reduction tends to introduce quite audible side effects unless set up very carefully, and even then you can only reduce the noise by a few dBs before the 'chirpies' return. TC Spark XL's noise reduction is infinitely better and makes Waveburner Pro's denoiser sound very sad indeed!
The stereo width expander provides a new slant on an old trick. Effectively, this plug‑in splits the audio into numerous frequency bands, then pans these alternatively left and right to provide a psychoacoustic increase in perceived width. Not only does this work for widening existing stereo, but it can also be used to fake stereo from mono. However, while the feeling of width increases, the stereo localisation doesn't generally improve so it works better with some material than others. Various controls enable the user to determine how the high and low ends of the spectrum are affected, how many frequency bands are created, and how much widening is applied.
Perhaps one of the most important types of plug‑in for mastering is the limiter, and the one supplied here is both simple to set up and very effective. As with Waves' L1, you set the maximum level you want the audio to reach before limiting takes place, then increase the input gain to force the signal up against the threshold. A high‑resolution gain‑reduction meter shows how much level the limiter is lopping off signal peaks, and for applications where more subtle limiting is required, there's a soft‑knee option to make the onset of limiting more progressive.
Pros
- Very easy to install and use.
- Handles fades and level changes very well.
- Good handling of track spacing and track start IDs.
- VST plug‑ins supported as well as the included mastering plug‑ins.
Cons
- No waveform‑level editing.
- Not ideal for compiling songs from multiple sections.
- Noise‑reduction plug‑in is disappointing.
Summary
Waveburner Pro is less than a full‑blown audio editor but far more than just an audio CD burning program. Most of the time it'll do everything you need, but occasionally you may need help from a dedicated audio editor.