Steinberg WaveLab 3 Operation Manual
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WAVELAB Master Section 10 – 251 Audio Input The Audio Input is a special Master Section plug-in that allows you to ren- der a signal coming in to a sound card’s input(s) together with any Master Section effects. This signal can be anything your sound card accepts, for example a feed from a mixer, a tape recorder or a microphone. An ASIO driver is required to use Audio Input. You set it up as follows: The first step is to designate which ASIO inputs should be used. This is done in the Preferences–Audio device tab: 1.Click the “Connections…” button to open the ASIO Audio Connections dialog. 2.Select which inputs to record from in the “External gear connections” section and close the Preferences dialog. Note that you only have to set the ASIO inputs – the External ASIO outputs are not relevant for Audio Input. 3.Click in the top Master Section effect slot, and select “Audio Input” from the ASIO sub-menu. • You can only use one instance of this plug-in, and it has be loaded into the top effect slot. Also, as long as the Audio Input plug-in is loaded, wave play- back is not possible. 4.The Audio input control panel appears, allowing you to set the desired number of inputs and the sample rate. 5.To monitor the Audio input, press Play on the transport. Normal wave playback will not happen (the cursor will not move), but the Play button will be lit, and you can now monitor the input source. Pressing Stop will stop input monitoring. •If you change the settings in the control panel, press Stop and restart playback to apply them. Note that if you are using any non-multichannel plug-ins in the Master Section effect chain, these are limited to two channels! You will also have to activate the required number of inputs in the ASIO Connections dialog to match the number of inputs selected here. A warning mes- sage will appear if any of the above criteria don’t match the selected number of inputs.
WAVELAB 10 – 252 Master Section 6.Click the Render button. A dialog appears allowing you to select a name, an audio format and a location for the file to be rendered. 7.When you click OK, recording (or rendering) starts, recording the external input from the output of the Master Section, including all real-time pro- cessing. You can monitor the recording as it happens. 8.Click Stop on the transport to stop the recording/rendering. Using External effects The External Gear Master Section plug-in allows you to process audio files using external hardware processors. One or more ASIO outputs are used to send the audio signal to your processor, and corresponding ASIO inputs are used to return the signal coming from the external processor. •By default, this plug-in is located in the ASIO sub-menu of the Master Section effects. An ASIO driver must be used. •Only one instance of this plug-in is allowed in the Master Section plug-in chain.
WAVELAB Master Section 10 – 253 To use the External gear plug-in, proceed as follows: The first step is to designate which ASIO channels should be used. 1.Open the Preferences–Audio device tab: 2.Click the “Connections…” button to open the ASIO Audio Connections dialog. 3.In the “External gear connections” section you can activate the output channels you wish to send to the external gear inputs in the “ASIO out- puts (to gear)” section, and which input channels the effect processor outputs should be connected to in the “ASIO inputs (from gear)” section. This should normally not be the same I/O channels as you use for playback/recording. The number of available outputs in this plug-in equals the number of inputs (up to 8). Close the Preferences dialog when you are done. 4.Click in a Master Section effect slot, and select “External Gear” from the ASIO sub-menu. The External Gear control panel opens. In the control panel you can set the following options: •“Num.Outputs” Here you can set the number of outputs to use. Normally this is the same as the number of inputs (the “As Inputs” option). You can however use a mono out/stereo in configuration in which case you set this parameter to “2” with the slider. •“Latency” External gear may introduce latency. WaveLab can automatically compensate for this if you select “Auto” (only active during rendering), or you can set this latency compensation your- self (in milliseconds). The latency introduced by the ASIO driver is automatically taken into account by WaveLab. •“Send level” This allows you to adjust the send level. This should normally be set to 0 dB. If necessary, adjust the input level on the external effect. 5.Now you can process a signal through the external processor, just like if it was a standard plug-in effect! 6.If you render a file using the External plug-in, playback will not be available during the rendering.
WAVELAB 11 – 256 Spectrum Editor Introduction The Spectrum editor is powerful audio restoration and processing tool set, using high quality linear-phase filters to process a spectrum selection both in the time and in the frequency domain. There are two main operational modes: •Surgical processing (offline processing). This is intended for audio restoration purposes applied to short time ranges. See “Surgical processing” on page 262. •Master Section processing. This allows you to process a specific frequency range via the Master Section. See “Master Section processing” on page 269. Both modes operate according to a spectrum region, which is set using the Spectrum selection tool. The region selection defines a time and a specific frequency range. This allows you to edit and process audio both in the time domain and in a specific frequency domain, as opposed to standard wave editing which always operates in the full frequency domain. This introduces a whole new approach to wave editing! Spectrum editing can perform many different types of processing, mainly aimed at audio restoration, but could certainly also be used for artistic or special effects – the filters are very powerful. Basics Selecting Spectrum display mode Spectrum editing can only be performed when Spectrum display mode is selected. •It should be noted that the Spectrum display isn’t really designed to be an alternative to the Wave display when it comes to standard editing proce- dures in WaveLab. It is specifically meant for audio restoration purposes using the various processing methods in the Spectrum editor, which are usually applied to very short time segments in an audio file.
WAVELAB Spectrum Editor 11 – 257 There are two ways to select Spectrum display mode: •By clicking the arrow button in the lower right corner of the main view, and selecting “Spectrum” from the pop-up menu that appears. •By selecting the Spectrum selection tool in the Tools control bar. This automatically switches the display mode to Spectrum in the main view and also opens the Spectrum editor dialog.
WAVELAB 11 – 258 Spectrum Editor The Spectrum display is a “spectrogram”, where each vertical line repre- sents the frequency spectrum at the corresponding time location. The bottom of the display corresponds to the lower frequencies while the up- per part of the display represents the higher frequencies. The intensity or level of the frequencies are either represented as a color spectrum, from red (maximum intensity) to purple/black (minimum inten- sity), or as a monochrome intensity (depending on the setting in the Spectrum options dialog – see below). It may take a while to get accustomed to “reading” the spectrogram, but you will find the effort worthwhile. •The vertical ruler on the left shows the frequency area (in Hz) for the spec- trum. •The status bar will show exact time/frequency positions for the mouse pointer. •You can perform standard selection and edit operations, just like in the Wave display. Note that the Pencil tool is not available.
WAVELAB Spectrum Editor 11 – 259 About the Spectrum options The Spectrum options dialog allows you to define how the frequency spectrum should be displayed. •You open the dialog by clicking the arrow button in the lower right corner of the main view, and selecting “Spectrum options…” from the pop-up menu. The dialog contains the following items: Option Description Style Use this to specify whether the Spectrum should be displayed in color or in one of two grayscale modes. Logarithmic frequency scaleIf this is activated, each octave in the frequency spectrum will be equally spaced vertically. However, linear mode (i.e. this option is not activated) is sometimes better suited for spectrograms. The reason for this is that for sound restoration purposes the “interesting” frequencies are often located in the upper end of the spectrum, and in linear mode the higher frequencies are displayed over a larger region. Range Any frequency below this level will not be displayed in the spectrogram. This option allows you to focus the display on the more audible part of the spec- trum. Audio gain for analysisThis allows you to apply gain to the analysis (audio is unchanged). This helps you find artefacts with low levels. Resolution This selects the size of the frequency analysis (FFT). This analysis calculates the spectrum from a block of audio samples. The selectable values represent the number of samples per analysis. The higher the value, the more frequen- cies can be analyzed, but the analysis will be less accurately localized in the time domain, and vice versa. Together with the FFT size, the time and fre- quency resolution is displayed on the menu.
WAVELAB 11 – 260 Spectrum Editor Defining a region All Spectrum editing functions are applied to (or from, if Master Section processing is used) a selected region. A region set in the Spectrum editor contains a time range (horizontal axis) and a frequency range (vertical axis). Before you start, it is a good idea to decide where in the file’s time range you would like to apply Spectrum editing. Then set it up so that the view is zoomed in on this range, and maybe also define this range with markers. This to enable you to view the area you wish to process in more detail, but also because screen redrawing (e.g. when changing horizontal zooming) takes time to compute in Spectrum display mode, especially when long audio segments are in view. You define a region in the following way: 1.Select the Spectrum selection tool. This will change the Wave window to Spectrum display mode (if not already selected) and will also open the Spectrum editor dialog. • The Spectrum editor dialog is non-modal and always open when the Spec- trum selection tool is selected. The current settings in the dialog do not matter when defining regions, so you can fold the dialog window or move it out of view if it is in the way. 2.You define a region by drawing a rectangle with the mouse in the Spec- trum view. The height and the vertical position of the rectangle defines the frequency range, and the horizontal axis defines the time range. •When defining a region in a stereo file, a “mirrored” region is automatically created in the other channel. To define a region in one channel only, press [Shift] while drawing the region.