But we always talk about trusting our ears in the studio, so why should meters be so important? Metering is of vital importance in mastering, a fact reflected in the amount of WaveLab’s toolset that is dedicated to the task.

Whilst many aspects of audio mastering have been thought of as ‘dark arts’ in the past – coming easily to the experienced mastering engineer but that are exceptionally difficult to pin down for the uninitiated – metering is much more definable, albeit quite varied.

Montages can contain multiple tracks too, with each individual clip retaining the ability to have its own processing chain, which is just the ticket for stem mastering. Realtime processing can be applied per-clip, per-track, per-montage (montages can be nested within montages), and across the overall master output. Collections or albums of songs – referred to in WaveLab-speak and from here-on as ‘montages’ – can be laid out, mastered and written to various output formats, including being written directly to audio CD.

Wave lab pro 10