Thanks. I had not looked at Wavelab. Some interesting tools there, but it strikes me as an odd grab bag of features that don’t really have a mission together. I have tools that do most of those things already (e.g. Izotope RX7), so I probably wouldn’t want to put out another $500 for Wavelab. The nice thing about StudioOne is that they have the essential mastering pieces right in the DAW. Again, my main concern is level-setting. Today I might drop Insight on the main bus, but you have to go through a full render to measure the LUs. With StudioOne you can do that in just a few seconds per song without having to do a full render.
Of course, with S1, the mastering step is separate and after the mixing step, as is traditional in the industry, which is why you don’t have to render to set levels. In my case, for quick projects I prefer to do the the mastering stuff on the master bus of my mix session. So maybe I am my own worst enemy here.
I guess if Wavelab were more tightly integrated with Cubase – AND IF STEINBERG OFFERED SPECIAL PRICING FOR EXISTING CUBASE USERS – I would be more inclined to buy Wavelab and use the more conventional mastering workflow.