DAWs

Mastering is more than the plugins#

You're entitled to bounce a mix, run it through a mastering plugin and call that the master. But if that's what you think mastering is, we're talking past each other. It's like saying you're a pilot because you've played flight simulator.

EQ, compressors and limiters are part of my job, not all of it. A large part of what decides my income is how efficiently I can work. All the repetitive and trivial tasks, session prep and rendering, I want to minimise so I can spend my time on the skilled part. If the DAW adds friction, I earn less money. More on that under workflow.

A mastering DAW has to handle the whole album#

Here is what I need every day:

• one shortcut that loads the session with every chain, regions and markers in place;
• non-destructive summing of 40 or 100 stems, so I work on the stereo and only dive into a stem when something is off;
• stem tracks and stereo tracks on the same gapless album;
• multiple versions of a track, such as a radio edit and an extended version, each with several revisions;
• notes for the whole session and for each track, and automation that differs between revisions;
• stored markers and batch rendering with automatic file naming.

If the client wants M1 of one track and M3 of another, and the vinyl gets cut from the wrong version, you could end up paying for the new lacquer out of your own pocket. It turns out, the ability to work in a professional way is actually an important requirement for a professional, which is why most DAWs fail in this regard.

A DAW built for making beats is built around one song#

Beat-making and composition DAWs can be excellent for production, and I rate some of them highly. But they're built around making one song, not mastering an album, so they lack the advanced rendering, versioning, note taking, region and scripting features. Dedicated mastering applications had CD markers and automatic naming in the '90s, but some of them can't cope with modern stem albums and survive on past prestige.

Reaper is the only DAW I recommend#

I use REAPER every day for everything audio. You can script anything it doesn't do out of the box. Every plugin has a wet/dry control and a delta shortcut. You can route anything anywhere. The render matrix is the professional tool needed for working on multiple tracks. It has parameter modulation, runs every common plugin format, is a download of tens of megabytes rather than gigabytes and handles unlimited tracks until your computer falls over.

It isn't perfect and it looks less pretty out of the box than many other DAWs. The learning curve is steep. The stock plugins are old and ugly.

REAPER and Bitwig already run natively on Linux, which is where things are heading; see operating systems.