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Integrated Reference Mix Tool


Jeremy Jensen

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I think it would be amazing if Cakewalk were to include easy reference mix comparison functionality comparable to Mastering the Mix's REFERENCE. Why this type of technology just isn't a built-in part of every DAW escapes me. Obviously you can do a lot of what REFERENCE does by other means, but not as usefully or conveniently as you can with REFERENCE or plug-ins like it.

 

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On 8/1/2019 at 9:02 AM, Jeremy Jensen said:

Why this type of technology just isn't a built-in part of every DAW escapes me.

Pile on the functionality says I, and this is something I would use, but I can also think of some reasons Cakewalk and other DAW's don't already come with this technology.

First, mature plug-ins that do it are readily available. For $60, I get get the one you've mentioned, or I can hop on over to Pluginboutique and cop the iZotope Ozone 8 Standard suite as a crossgrade from any of the iZotope Elements suites I already own. Ozone Standard comes with a similar tool, one that is integrated with other parts of Ozone and Neutron, and....sheesh, I can't learn mastering chops fast enough to stay ahead of what iZotope's tools are starting to be able to do. At some point, I may just give up.

Second, as you say, there are other means, so just going by the video, what does it do? I'm going to go down a list here, not to knock it down, but to see how well I am doing without one of these in my toolbox so far. Although if I had $60 in my budget for that Ozone Standard crossgrade....

a. You can set up multiple  sections of the songs you are referencing for looping. That's neat, but the idea of having it is not knocking me out. I usually just hop around with the mouse.

b. Loudness match of the different sections. Hmm. For referencing, I do pretty well adjusting manually. And I want to know if there are loudness differences in the different sections. So not much for me there. Hornet makes a $5 plug-in that will gain stage all your tracks for you.

I'm not sure what he means about the automatically aligning the tracks so that you can tell if you have a different version. I usually reference my one mix to several other tracks.

The various analysis tools' functions can be had for free in the form of Voxengo's Multiband Correlometer and SPAN, as well as Meldaproduction's MStereoScope, MLoudnessAnalyzer, and especially MAnalyzer. The last one lets you take an EQ and amplitude profile of your track and compare it either to another track or to a set of standard genre profiles that it already has in its preset bank. Boz Digital's Panipulator is good for pushbutton auditioning of what a mono playback will sound like, etc.

The savvy Cakewalk user can make a track template or FX Preset Chain with these analysis tools in it for mastering analysis.

Of course I agree that it's nice to have all of this stuff integrated, but that might be a long way off, maybe some of this will help tide you over.

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