I may have to check out WL 8.5. Still generally frustrated in the Mac world when it comes to laying out CD/DDP masters. Sonic's soundBlade is still weird to me. It's great on a basic level, but the way I tend to work, I bring in songs that were mastered thru an analog process and monitored thru the peak limiter, but I don't print the peak-limited files. I let the peak limiter do its work in the final output stage. That makes it easy for me to go back in and make subtle EQ and loudness tweaks for the client.
SoundBlade is fine with a peak limiter in the final output, but their implementation of plug-ins on individual song tracks has been pretty abysmal. Maybe they've got it better now, but I just lost faith in that aspect a while ago. DSP Quattro is basic and handy, but BEWARE. It can place a "tick" at the beginning of a track because of some buffering issues. So you have to close the session and re-open it and DON'T hit play or else you load the buffers and risk the "tick". Apple abandoned Waveburner Pro years ago with absolutely no fix to their broken DDP function.
Lately, I've been very impressed with Presonus Studio One v2 for master DDP creation, plug-in implementation, and even track exporting in various formats. It's a nice tool, very stable. BUT, they are still way behind with respect to track marker implementation, ability to control start and end markers, and even the ability to delete a track marker. If they fix that, then I would suggest people really check it out, mac or pc. It's impressive other than the miserable track marker issues.
So now I'm interested in Wavelab and may give it a go. I just hate having to buy a dongle just to test drive it.
B