User manual WAVE ARTS POWER SUITE 5

[. . . ] Wave Arts Power Suite 5 User Manual Last updated: March 7, 2007 Copyright © 2007, Wave Arts, Inc. All Rights Reserved 1 Table of Contents Table of Contents 1. Installation and Registration. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 1. 1 Mac OS X Installation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 1. 2 Windows Installation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 1. 3 Registration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 1. 4 Registration Troubleshooting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 1. 5 Video Tutorials . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . [. . . ] Mono to mono or stereo to stereo operation. Presets for CD and DVD-audio mastering and track compression. A diagram of FinalPlug's audio routing and meter placement is shown below. 69 Wave Arts Power Suite FinalPlug is most commonly used as the final plug-in to process a mix on the master output. It allows you to maximize the volume of a mix while preventing the sound from exceeding a certain level, so that digital clipping doesn't occur. It is more flexible than normalizing, since you aren't simply increasing the volume of the entire track by a constant gain. FinalPlug dynamically reduces peaks to be more in line with the rest of the signal, and with careful use, you can increase the perceived loudness of a mix by 6 to 12 dB without any audible artifacts. If you are preparing a CD master, FinalPlug's truncation and dithering features can be used to reduce the bit depth of your recording to 16 bits while minimizing the amount of quantization noise that can be perceived. FinalPlug's peak limiting, truncation, and dithering features are explained in more detail in the following section. 6. 2 About FinalPlug Peak Limiting FinalPlug's peak limiter can be used to do tasks ranging from light peak limiting to volume maximization to very heavy compression. The FinalPlug limiter detects peaks in the signal and very quickly reduces the input gain prior to the peak, preventing clipping. After the peak has passed, FinalPlug restores the input gain to the nominal level. The peak limiter will limit any peak that exceeds the threshold level set by the user. The peak limiter uses a built-in lookahead delay to respond to peaks just before they occur. Both the lookahead delay and attack time are fixed at 1. 5 milliseconds. This is designed according to the pre-masking phenomenon of the human auditory system whereby loud sounds effectively mask sounds that occurred just prior. Hence, any distortion caused by the rapid gain ducking will be effectively masked by the onset of the peak. The shape of the peak itself is unaffected by the gain ducking; this is in contrast to peak limiters that use wave shaping techniques. After the peak has passed, the gain is restored to nominal level according to the release time set by the user. The release time is an important parameter. Short release times cause the gain to be increased rapidly after peaks. This is important when you want to aggressively compress a signal. However, short release times also cause the gain to modulate more deeply during steady audio signals, causing distortion. This is because with aggressive settings the peak limiter will be compressing each oscillation of the input signal; ducking the gain to allow the peak oscillation to pass, then quickly restoring the gain as the signal passes through 0. In contrast, long release times prevent distortion during steady audio signals. [. . . ] 30, 38 Reflection type . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 Reflections . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55, 56, 98, 103 Registration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31, 57, 70, 87 Reverb algorithm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56, 63 Reverb decay time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54, 97, 103, 109 RMS mode . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 S Sampling rate. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . [. . . ]