WaveLab Cast
Professional podcast production on a budget
Around $84.66 From Steinberg.net
Needs macOS 10.15 or later, minimum 4GB RAM, and 4GB free storage space
Steinberg is best known as the developer of professional music production software including Cubase and WaveLab. With WaveLab Cast, it brings its decades of experience to a product that’s aimed at podcasters, radio, or video producers. Anyone who has used the company’s other apps will recognize its look and feel, inherited from the flagship WaveLab suite.
Fire it up and you are presented with a helpful list of project templates, which create the relevant number of audio tracks in a new project. You can import audio files of course, and also record directly into WaveLab Cast in up to 96KHz, 32–bit quality. It can record from any connected microphone or for multi–mic recordings, from a connected audio interface. Routing sound to tracks and setting levels is straightforward.
For absolute beginners there will likely be something of a learning curve while you familiarize yourself with a few core concepts and terms involved in tracking, editing, and mixing sound. Those with a little prior knowledge, and certainly more experienced users, will find it all pretty self–explanatory.
A tab system is used to let you work on your main “montage” of tracks and clips, edit individual clips and use the advanced monitors and meters to keep an eye on volume levels. Wave editing tools are provided to help you cut and slice audio, and there are clever automated tools like silence detection and removal that can save a huge amount of editing time with spoken word tracks. There’s also auto–ducking which will quieten background sounds like music whenever a voice is present.
Plug–in audio effects are supported of course, but Steinberg has also placed essential and easy–to–use sound shaping tools in the Inspector panel for every audio track to let you de–ess, clean up, and EQ your sound amongst other things. Video import is available too, meaning you can dub voice and music over picture while remaining in sync. When finished, export mixdowns to hard drive or directly to a number of supported podcasting platforms. Attractively priced, WaveLab Cast offers a very solid tool set for recording, mixing and producing all manner of spoken word content to a highly professional level.
THE BOTTOM LINE. A really powerful and well–featured voice production toolkit. HOLLIN JONES