WaveLab is to a stereo file what a digital audio workstation (DAW) is to individual tracks. One such tool is Steinberg WaveLab Pro ($560), a powerful package that engineers have been using to put the finishing touches on audio for over 20 years. It allows you to optimize and process your final mix in countless ways, making it sound its very best no matter what device is playing it back. This requires another realm of knowledge and completely different tools. Instead of comping multiple takes and dialing in reverbs, the focus changes to bit depth, dither, limiting, stereo image, headroom, sample rate conversion, file formats, final EQ…. If you want your final output to be its very best, you need to be as savvy wrangling just two tracks as you are 200.

We work our magic and reduce all of those tracks, in most cases, to a simple stereo audio file. Those of us in the audio production world work with lots of channels: 80 inputs to our digital mixer, 64 streams recorded into the computer, hundreds of tracks for mixdown.

Steinberg mastering software