Steinberg WaveLab 3 Operation Manual

							 
3
 
Installing and setting up 
						

							 
WAVELAB
3 – 22 Installing and setting up
 
Setting up the computer
 
Before proceeding, your computer should be set up and the following 
items should be installed:
 
• Windows (see “This is what you need…” on page 16 for details on which version 
to use).
• The audio card and its driver.
 
Checking the audio card
 
To make sure the audio card will work as expected, you can perform the 
following two tests:
 
•
 
Use the software included with the audio card to make sure you can 
record and play back without problems.
 
•
 
Use the Media Player application (included with Windows and described 
in the Windows documentation) to record and play back audio.
 
Colors
 
At this point you might want to check and for example change the number
 
 
of colors you use on your computer screen. See your Windows docu-
mentation for instructions on how to do this. The recommended setting 
for WaveLab is 24 or 32 bit mode (“True Color”). 
						

							 
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Installing and setting up 3 – 23
 
Installation procedure
 
The Steinberg Key
 
Please read the following section before installing the  WaveLab software.
 
Included with the WaveLab package, you will find the Steinberg Key 
(sometimes referred to as a “dongle”), a hardware copy protection device 
that is part of the WaveLab copy protection scheme. WaveLab will not 
run if there is no Steinberg Key.
 
The Steinberg Key
 
The Steinberg Key is, in fact, a little computer on which your Steinberg 
software licenses are stored. All hardware-protected Steinberg products 
use the same type of key, and you can store more than one license on one 
key. Also, licenses can (within certain limits) be transferred between keys 
– which is helpful, e.g. if you want to sell a piece of software. 
 
•
 
If you already own copy-protected Steinberg software, you must remove 
any existing Steinberg Keys from the computer’s USB port before starting 
the WaveLab installation routine.
 
•
 
If you are using other copy-protected Steinberg products, you may want 
to transfer all licenses for your applications to only one Steinberg Key, 
thus using only one USB port of your computer. More information on the 
transfer of licenses between keys can be found in the help for the Syn-
crosoft License Control Center (which can be found in the Start/Pro-
grams menu of your computer).
 
The Steinberg Key must not be plugged in before the installation of  Wave-
Lab. Otherwise the operating system of your computer will register it as 
new USB hardware and try to find drivers that won’t be present before 
 
WaveLab installation. 
						

							 
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3 – 24 Installing and setting up
 
Installing the software 
 
The installation procedure unpacks all the files and automatically puts 
them in the right places.
 
1.Insert the CD-ROM disk in the drive.
The installation program should start automatically after a few seconds. If, for some reason 
it doesn’t – for instance if you have “Auto Insert Notification” deactivated for your CD drive 
– perform steps 2-4 below. Otherwise, proceed to step 5.
2.Launch the Explorer, open the “My Computer” window or select “Run” 
from the Start menu.
3.Locate and double click on the drive symbol for the CD-ROM drive.
4.Double click on the “setup” symbol (setup.exe).
5.Follow the instructions on screen.
•If you are updating from WaveLab 4, WaveLab 5 or WaveLab Essential 
you will need to enter both the serial number and the original CD that 
came with the previous version.
6.At one point of the installation a dialog appears requesting you to connect 
your Steinberg Key – do so.
The first time the copy protection device is plugged in, it will be registered as a new hard-
ware device, and a dialog will appear asking you whether you would like to find drivers for 
the device manually or automatically. You should select to find drivers automatically, and 
click OK to proceed and close the dialog.
7.Finally, a dialog informs you that the installation was successful.
A restart may be requested – but if no dialog requests a restart it is not necessary to do so.
When the installation is finished, the program is found among your other 
programs on the Start menu and/or the desktop.
This completes the installation of your WaveLab program! But, you’re not 
really done yet…
Register your software!
Registering your software will make sure you are entitled to technical sup-
port and kept aware of updates and news regarding WaveLab. 
						

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Installing and setting up 3 – 25
Launching WaveLab
1.Make sure the Steinberg Key is plugged into the USB port.
2.Launch WaveLab.
WaveLab starts.
• The Steinberg Key has to be plugged in at all times when running  WaveLab. 
Program settings
Before you start working, you should make some settings:
Audio card settings
You need to specify which audio card and driver you intend to use. Wave-
Lab can communicate with the audio card via any of the standard proto-
cols; ASIO, MME or WDM. Note:
•For multichannel operation and other WaveLab features like the External 
gear plug-in you must use an ASIO driver.
Selecting an ASIO driver
1.Open the Preferences–Audio device tab.
2.Select the ASIO driver from the “Playback device” pop-up menu.
Note that the “Playback device” menu heading has now changed to “Playback/Record de-
vice” and the Recording device section has been greyed out. This is because with ASIO, 
the same driver is always used both for output and input.
3.If you click the “Control Panel” button the audio card settings application 
(usually installed with the audio card) for the ASIO driver opens.
In the Control Panel you may find settings for buffer size, digital formats, additional I/O con-
nections, etc. depending on the audio card and the driver.
4.Click on the “Connections” button.
The ASIO Audio connections dialog will appear, listing all available channel inputs and out-
puts in WaveLab.
Internally there are 8 fixed WaveLab channels that can be freely mapped 
to ASIO outputs and inputs on your audio interface. “Surround channels” 
are the available surround speaker channels. See 
“The ASIO Audio Con-
nections dialog”
 on page 507 for more information about the ASIO Au-
dio connections 
dialog.
5.Close the dialog. 
						

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3 – 26 Installing and setting up
•When using ASIO, the playback resolution is set from the ASIO driver 
(you may find a setting for this in the ASIO Control Panel, depending on 
the hardware and driver).
Therefore, the Playback Resolution settings will be greyed out.
Selecting an MME/WDM driver
1.Select “Preferences…” from the Options menu.
2.Click on the Audio device tab.
3.Select the audio card you want to use for recording and playback from 
the pop-ups.
If you only have one audio card you can also select the “Microsoft Sound Mapper” options 
(the sound mapper is a “virtual audio card” which “maps” all audio to your real card). How-
ever this does not let you take full advantage of the card’s driver when recording audio and 
is therefore not recommended.
4.Choose your “Playback Resolution”.
Additional audio settings
There are other settings in the Preferences that affect audio playback and 
recording. We recommend that you try the default settings before you 
change anything, since these work well in most cases.
On the “Audio Card” tab, you will find the following settings:
• Playback Buffer Number and Size.
These determine how much RAM memory is used for buffering when playing back. If you 
get playback problems such as dropouts or glitches, you should try to increase these val-
ues. Click the question mark icon in the dialog for details.
With ASIO drivers, you may find these settings in the ASIO Control Panel.
• Recording Buffer Number and Size (not available when using ASIO).
These determine how much RAM is used for buffering when recording. If you get dropouts 
in the recorded audio, you should try increasing these values. Click the question mark icon 
in the dialog for details.
On the Preferences–File tab, you will find the following settings:
• Disk block buffer size.
Governs the buffer size used when WaveLab is reading data from the hard disk. If you ex-
perience problems in a read intensive scenario (such as playing back an Audio Montage 
with a lot of simultaneous clips), you should try changing this value. 
If you change this setting, playback will stop when you leave the dialog. 
						

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Installing and setting up 3 – 27
• Use system cache.
When this is deactivated (default), WaveLab reads files directly from the hard disk, bypass-
ing Windows’ file cache.
We recommend that you leave this option deactivated!
The option is available since it may remedy problems on certain systems with slow disk 
drives. Note:
• If you activate this, avoid using large disk block buffer size values!
• After activating this option, you need to close and reopen all open files, for the 
setting to take effect!
About latency
In the Playback section of the Audio device tab, you will find an indication 
of the current latency (at 16bit/44.1kHz stereo). Latency is the delay be-
tween when audio is “sent” from the program and when you actually hear 
it. The latency in an audio system depends on the audio hardware, its driv-
ers and their settings. It’s usually possible to reduce latency by lowering 
the number and size of the playback/recording buffers. However, please 
note:
While a very low latency can be crucial in a real-time DAW application such 
as Steinberg Nuendo or Cubase, this is not strictly the case with  WaveLab. 
Here the important issues are optimum and stable playback and editing 
precision. Therefore, you should not try to reach the lowest possible latency 
figures when working with WaveLab. And again, should you get dropouts, 
crackles or glitches during playback, raise the Buffer Number setting on the 
Preferences–Audio device tab. 
						

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3 – 28 Installing and setting up
Temporary files
You also need to specify where WaveLab should store its temporary files. 
Temporary files are used for certain operations, such as WaveLab’s ex-
tensive Undo function (see “Undo and Redo” on page 47).
WaveLab allows you to specify up to three different folders for storing 
temporary files. If you have access to more than one drive, saving your 
temp files on separate drives (not partitions) can considerably speed up 
performance. 
For example, if your source files are located on the C: drive, you could 
specify D:\temp and E:\temp as temporary folders.
This will not only improve performance, but also reduce disk fragmentation.
1.In Windows, create a separate folder in which to store your “temp” files.
The folder(s) should be on your fastest hard disk and you should make sure 
you have plenty of room available on that hard disk (or partition). Putting the 
“temp” files on a separate drive (that is, not the same drive as your regular 
files) will speed up file operations considerably.
2.Select “Folders…” from the Options menu.
This opens the Folders dialog, where you can edit how various WaveLab folders are han-
dled (see “Folder editing” on page 731). 
3.Click on the plus sign beside the “Temporary folders” item (this is located 
in the “Work folders” category).
Three possible folders can be specified for temp files.
4.Selecting one of the Temporary Folder items will show the current loca-
tion where the temp files will be created in the Folder field to the right.
5.Either type in the path to the directory or you can browse the drives to 
locate and select the folder via a standard Windows file dialog.
Click OK to select a folder and exit the file dialog. 
						

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Installing and setting up 3 – 29
Peak and view memories
A peak file is a small file with the extension “.gpk” automatically created by 
WaveLab each time a file is modified or opened in WaveLab (if it hasn’t 
been previously). The peak file contains information about the waveform, 
and determines how it is drawn in the wave window.
View memory files (extension “.mem”) store view information relating to a 
specific audio file such as window and scroll positions, etc., and option-
ally any Master Section effects used – see “Saving view settings” on 
page 124.
By default, peak files and view memory files are stored in the same folder 
as the related audio file. Setting this to another folder on a different drive 
will also improve performance to a certain degree. Regardless of whether 
this folder is on a different drive or not you also get the advantage of not 
having the audio file folder cluttered with non-audio files if a separate 
folder is used.
This folder can be specified from the Folders dialog, either directly or via 
the Preferences–Wave edit tab.
Select Preferences from the Options menu and select the Wave edit tab.
•If the “Save view settings in companion file” option is activated, view 
memory files will be saved in the same folder as the related audio file.
•If you select “Save in independent folder” you can click the “Edit” button, 
which will open the Folder dialog with the “Peak and view memories” 
work folder selected.
From here you can navigate to a new folder location to store the peak and view memory 
temp files. 
						

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3 – 30 Installing and setting up
Installing a CD/DVD recorder
Hardware installation/connection
For general instructions on installing internal or connecting external re-
corders via USB or Firewire, please refer to the instructions that came 
with the computer, or the recorder itself.
For WaveLab, please just check the following points:
• Make sure to have the latest firmware version installed in your recorder unit. For 
CD recorders, the firmware you have must support Disk-at-Once mode! In addi-
tion, running a unit with older firmware might for example prevent you from writing 
sub-index markers into the tracks.
Checking the installation of the CD/DVD recorder
You might want to check that the recorder unit was actually found by the 
program. Proceed as follows:
1.Select “CD/DVD Information…” from the Tools menu.
The CD/DVD Info dialog appears.
2.Check that your recorder unit appears in the list to the left.
The list will also contain any regular DVD-ROM drives, etc. If your CD/DVD recorder isn’t 
listed, there’s either something wrong with the installation or the unit is not supported by 
WaveLab.