clone, render and re-open montage

Hi,

1- Amongst other uses like providing rough mixes to clients with a bit of maximizing + mp3 conversion, I use Wavelab 9 & 9.5 for finalizing mastering projects :This has changed a lot in a few years as cd burning has become very rare, even though I produce DDP masters but now it is mainly a question of providing files for streaming and vinyl. This had led me to change my mastering workflow quite a bit

Either I didn’t read the manual correctly or the function I am looking for doesn’t exist, but I cannot find a way of doing precisely what I want :

What I would like to be able to do, is render the montage so that it reopens with the audio in the same place but with all active effects rendered, and most important, clip names, isrc, CD text all exactly the same. This would be VERY useful in frequent situations where I work in a montage with plugins on some clips, or/and on one track, and then a heavy final chain on the Master section like for example a resampler, a multiband compressor and my usual final compressor & limiters setup.

I know you can do something approaching with a 24 bit Bin Cue … Yes BUT it names the tracks after the CD text, which doen not accept accentuation etc. I would prefer on straight "clone, render and re-open " command thing
The reason this has become important, is that in the past I used to derive everything from the CD montage, the files provided beeing mostly 16 bit waves and mp3.
But I need to have a 32bitF montage with all the main plugs rendered but not the last plugins so I then can tweak the finalizing (TP, LUFS etc for all the different uses. Re-rendering the whole thing several times is very time consuming
I hope my explanation is not too confusing
2- I edited out this last point
Thanks for your attention !
Mark Haliday

I think what you are asking is something I do for every single project. When I have my montage dialed in how I want it, I do a render of the full montage at the same sample rate, with no dither, and to a floating point file.

There is a setting to have WaveLab fully recreate the montage after rendering. Everything is present besides the plugins.

See attachment. It doesn’t have to be 24-bit.

From here I can insert a dither and render 24-bit/high sample rate WAVs of each track, or use the Custom Montage Duplicate option where I convert the full render down to 44.1k using Saracon or RX, and then I tell WaveLab to duplicate the montage using the new SRC’d file at the new sample rate.

All markers, ISRC, text, metadata, etc are preserved.

From here I can change the live dither plugin to 16-bit to render 1644 WAVs, a DDP, or turn off the dither to render mp3 from the 44.1k floating point source.

Am I missing something you need? You can turn OFF restrict to ASCII in the CD-Text Editor box if you need special characters.

I must do something incorrect with a setting here because although the markers are preserved they are not at exactly the same timeframe point in the new montage … which can be important if your label prefers you to send masters and CDs with 00 frames (ie 03:30:00 not 03:30:19). You would expect the SRCd file to be a few ms different and I haven’t really tried to get to the bottom of it … maybe because the track splices are linked to the clip in the montage. And I’m on Windoze.

The one unfortunate thing about this workflow is that the markers are quantized to the nearest CD frame. I’ve asked PG to find a workaround for this.

I’m referring to the first step rendering the montage as a full file and having WL create a new montage from the resulting file. Because that process relies on a .cue file, the makers become quantized. I don’t think the Custom Montage Duplicate feature alone is altering the track times and audio though.

However, I’m in the habit of quantizing the markers to the nearest CD frame before I do my first render, this way all my montages match 100%, down to the millisecond and CD frame.

99.9% of the time, quantizing the markers first is not a problem.

Every now and then I have a case where it’s a digital-only release (no CD) and the markers need to be super precise and not quantized. In these rare cases, I can simply delete all the markers in the new montage, copy them from the old montage, and paste them into the new montage.

With Saracon and RX, I haven’t had a case where the external SRC is adding time…not to mention, it’s technically just one file.

Justin, maybe I’m just really tired, but I don’t understand the purpose of using a .cue file to do this. I render “whole montage”, “copy markers”, “open in new montage”, and it makes a new montage with one continuous file at the same rate as the original, and the markers are exactly where they were in the original, not quantized. Like I said maybe I’m just reading it wrong, but I don’t understand the purpose of the .cue.

EDIT. Unless it’s because of CD Text and ISRC in the original. That, I guess, is what you’re talking about.

Conversion of a 24 bit 96kHz wave file to a 24 bit 44.1 wave file in SaraCon will consistently result in a file longer by 9ms here.

Ah, I see you’re on Windows. I’ve heard reports from one other person that Saracon on Windows does that. I think it’s a bug. Saracon on Mac, as well as RX which I’ve been using lately instead of Saracon for SRC.

Maybe you can email Weiss to see if they have a build that doesn’t do this on Windows.

Right. While I really don’t care about having the .cue file, choosing that option in the render options will carry over all the info for me automatically. I still do enough stuff that is CD related that I’m just in the habit of quantizing. Even if something isn’t going to CD, if the songs have normal silence between them, having the markers quantized isn’t really a concern. And even when songs are overlapping most of the time, having the markers quantized still allows for the marker to be in a reasonable spot.

Also, this means that when I crate a PQ report for the vinyl master, that the markers are precise to what the report says.

It would be nice if the CD/PQ/Vinyl Report didn’t quantize the markers but all this is to say…

There are only a handful of cases where I need the makers to not be quantized and in those cases, that’s when I’ll just manually copy and paste the makers from the old montage to the new.

For 99% of of the EP/album projects I do, quantizing the markers does no harm…and it also future proofs them if they do end up pressing CDs, and it makes sure the vinyl PDF report for each side matches the markers.

For the current state of WaveLab, for me, it just makes life easier.

Again, I don’t actually need the .cue file…and it doesn’t convert anything to 24-bit (as suggested in the OP), it just helps WaveLab help me. I never even look at or open the .cue and honestly forgot that it’s there.

Thanks everyone,
Presently I am away, I will test this when I come back !
Mark

HI, I am back and i still d’ont understand why a very simple workflow problem is so complicated to solve ?

All I am asking for is a simple “clone montage with rendered processing” option in the render section. The result beeing the same montage, with all the ISRC & cd-txt stuff, but with the rendered audio, which means of course that all clip levels are reset to zero. I realize that with reverbs in the processing chain some extra options are needed to solve the problem of the processed audio beeing longer. But for the rest it seems simple request ?
Best regards,
Mark Haliday

I’m curious as to why the settings in my first response do not work for you. I do this for every single project to print the sound of all the plugins, and have the montage fully recreated as a result.

From there, you also have many options to get to a lower sample rate such as Custom Montage Duplicate.

Thanks for your input,
but the procedure you are talking about takes the C-TEXT and translates that into track names. In french as in other european countries, this is not good, as CD-TEXT does not take accented character. And I don’t want to override the asci limitations
I want to keep both separate, I WANT AN EXACT CLONE. I have my reasons for wanting different content in the track title and CD-TEXT, often I use caps in cd text, and not in the track names, and these are important later, when I render the files for streaming etc.
I see no reason at all why there should not be a tick box in the render options overriding all others, that just says render and clone audio montage, period. That is precisely my request. I know there are workarounds, but they don’t suit my workflow
But thanks again for making the effort to find a solution :slight_smile:
Best regards
mark

Fair enough. Maybe PG will consider these changes but I was just trying to tell you what’s possible with the tools available right now today.