I posted a problem report on SoundBlade HD over on the miscellaneous forum last night, and thought I'd review what people said in this earlier discussion about mastering apps on the Mac.
I'm going to see if I can find out anything useful on GS about some of the choices that have come up, but am also going to sift through this thread to see if anyone came up with a convincing proposal for using DP for mastering.
I am primarily focusing on Mastering this week, but just wanted to bump this topic first as a way of alerting people to the other post, as I talk about more than SoundBlade there.
I'll update this post during the week as I get deeper on each of the apps that I audition for the Mastering task. I know a lot of people have been frustrated by the slow adoption of 64-bit support in this one area of Mac applications. Hopefully I'll learn something useful to share.
UPDATE: After reviewing the entire thread, I see that Dave Polich had the same problems I did with the soundBlade demo, so I am deleting my separate post on that problem report from last night, and placing it here for context.
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After deciding I do not like StudioOne's Project Mode for Mastering, while finally giving it a spin tonight, I am so stuck regarding lack of 64-bit options for Mastering on Macs.
So, I downloaded a demo for SoundBlade HD 2.2.1. No go; too many attempts to launch it have crashed or frozen with my CPU at 100% and Out of Memory (yikes; I have 16 GB!).
Is Digital Performer the only app that has a decent plug-in validator? I know people complain about it here, but quite frankly, every other app that I have is far more crash-prone on plug-in validation and much less likely to provide feedback during the process itself.
SoundBlade does NOT update its GUI while trying to validate plug-ins. I have given up; I need to get this album mastered now that we finally have final mixes, and the iLok license based demo expires in 14 days.
Not sure if I'm eligible to try WaveEditor again, but it's a new version by now so maybe they aren't complete idiots in that regard (several companies only let you try once-in-a-lifetime).
I suppose I could try Triumph again as well, even though I couldn't get my head wrapped around it when it first replaced WaveEditor.
My backup plan is to apply plug-ins one-at-a-time in iZotope RX, as before. It doesn't support a plug-in chain, unfortunately, or simultaneous monitoring via a Master Fader or the like.
Once the mastering itself is done, I could use DSP-Quattro (which is 32-bit-only) for CD assembly, DDP, CD-Text, etc.
It would have been nice to have been able to try SoundBlade, but I suspect it is yet another piece of software that isn't really being maintained or developed going forward.
Worse comes to worse, I can grin and bear it and use StudioOne. I don't like how they impose workflow on you, and I especially dislike the integration with Song Mode (though you can ignore it, it nevertheless is how the app is setup to work and thus it is more work to use StudioOne JUST for mastering).
I consider it dangerous to combine mixing with mastering via automatic linking. Sure, it "saves time", but the whole point to me is to get into a completely different app and mind space when mastering. I don't mind the "extra time" in managing file transfers between programs, as it gives me a chance to do sanity checks and verify status as well as document things.
Maybe DP would be the best bet after all, if finding a new workflow that keeps Mastering completely separate from Recording and Mixing. For instance, using Sequences and Chunks in a way that decouples (also via a separate DP Project) the Mastering from the Mixing altogether.