clintmartin wrote:n2mpujack wrote:
Waveform editing is not a function of the mastering process. There's a difference between mastering and having a mastering suite of plugins. Until Ozone 7 you could not use that product as a standalone mastering tool; you had to use it inside either a daw or waveform editor like Soundforge or Audition or whatever audio editor one uses. But you still can't do things like fades in it so you need a separate program for that purpose. A 'suite' is just a collection of things in one place. TRacks provides you with the tools to use in mastering and is not really a standalone mastering program as such.
Really mastering is about making things work together in an assemblage for an album and is not meant for deep editing. And if you have to do deep editing then you're better off going back and having the music remixed. Mastering can't polish a turd, if you will.
I agree with most of what you say, but waveform editing can (IMHO it should) be part of the mastering process, and T-Racks could easily be a great standalone mastering program. I see no harm in making a product better. Since T-Racks doesn't allow the use of 3rd party plugins...they really need to add the essential tools a lot of people use. If they want the Standalone option to be useful.
It's still a great program. I have all of the modules except the stealth limiter, and it's certainly a nice useful tool on the master bus, but I vote they try to make it the best mastering suite available.
TRacks will never be the best mastering suite available because there are other better purpose built programs that do the job. The previously mentioned Ozone 7 is but one. There are only a couple of plugins in TRacks that would even be fit for mastering. The Mastering EQ432 and maybe the Quad Comp and that's it. Everything else is better suited on individual tracks in a piece of music or on the 2-bus. A Manley Massive Passive EQ would be a good add as would be a transparent compressor. Mastering engineers generally don't have a ton of hardware consisting of stuff like a Pultec EQ, 1176 and LA2A compressors, any one of a number of buss compressors, etc. The bulk of their hardware goes into things like quality ad/da converters, monitors and amps to power them, along with excellent quality eq and compressor and limiter with the most important thing - proper room acoustics.
And again mastering engineers don't do any waveform editing other than to maybe add fades to a piece of mixed music. By the time one gets to mastering the tune is already mixed; mastering engineers don't get the raw tracks of a piece of music. I've seen where a mastering engineer will throw music back to the mixer to redo a piece of music because even with all the tools that a mastering engineer has he/she can't make a piece work with other pieces of music as a whole.
Most of what's in TRacks is best suited for a mixing or tracking situation. I'm not saying that because of the quality of the plugins but the actual functions of those plugins. Tape delay - you'll never see it in a mastering room.
