 Today's music producers are blessed with an incredible choice of doors or digital audio workstations. But while some may do certain tasks a little more to your liking, it's actually rare to find a completely unique feature. But there is one that comes to mind. Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you're well. You know, I think the best door is the one that you currently love. We each have our own way of working and our own preferences, so I'm not here to tell you that one door is better than another. However, I do think that one door has a feature which is so unique and so useful that you may even consider using it alongside your current door. I'm going to be telling you later how you can gain access to it to try it out for less than $15 via our sponsor for this video, Sweetwater. Now the feature is called the project page and it's a part of Prisonis Studio One Professional. But before we look at what it does, let's take a look at what problems it solves. Eventually we all have to export our music to a format that can be used or listened to, typically something like a Wayfar or an MP3. And if you want to release your music commercially, then you almost certainly want to master it. Now mastering is not only the process of sonically improving or enhancing your music, but it's also making sure that it meets the technical requirements of the platform that you're releasing to. Now before you go ahead and master, I always recommend that you first export to a stereo file and then master that. Mastering from within your actual song project in your door has a few problems. First of all, it's a poor separation of tasks. You'll always be tempted to go back and tweak that snare or that vocal. When you start mastering, you really want to think that your mix is completely done. Secondly, it can put a tremendous strain on your computer. Some of those mastering plugins are really quite cumbersome and you're already using quite a lot of plugins, so it doesn't really work out that well. You always feel that this was not a task that your door was designed for. Apart from the music and the file itself, there's other things involved in a release. We may be setting up metadata for things like the artist, the composer, and even things like artwork for singles or for albums. Talking about albums, we may also be determining the order of songs in an EP or an album. All of these are considerations depending on the platform that we're releasing to. The Studio One project page takes care of all of these issues in one convenient place. Here's a typical project in an EP for Studio One. In the top left we can see each song which has been added by simply dragging and dropping a wave file which you can export from any door. As you can see, each song has a title as well as there being an album title and artist above. We can easily change the order of songs by dragging them around and expanding each song reveals that we can add and edit metadata for that song including artwork. As we select each song we can see and get access to the plugins we're using to master that song and also get some useful loudness information. Below this area we can also add plugins for all of our songs as a whole either pre or post fader. I find this really useful for things like metering plugins. We also have a listen bus. This is for plugins that we want to hear while mastering but we don't want in the final export. Typically this will be monitor correction plugins like Sonarworks sound ID. Note that both the song and the master area have faders which can be automated. In the bottom area of the page we can see our songs represented by waveforms. Here we can do simple common tasks like trimming the ends of our tracks or adding things like fadeouts. We can also edit automation here which I'll get back to later. The top right provides us with many kinds of metering tools using different standards and finally at the top we can start exporting our release in many different ways from burning CDs to digital and streaming targets. By the way we can easily adjust the loudness here to match the requirements of platforms such as Spotify and YouTube or various broadcast requirements. As you can see the project page in Studio One is much more than just a mastering tool which is probably why they didn't call it the mastering page. Talking of mastering there is one key aspect of that process which the project page deals with really well. In earlier versions the project page received criticism for not having any automation features. Personas listened to this and added several ways that you can automate while mastering on the project page. Firstly as mentioned previously we can automate both the track and master faders by simply writing our movements there. Secondly we have clip gain automation on each track. This enables us to automate the track level before it hits the plugins in our mastering chain. Thirdly we can edit our automation in the lower view either by automating individual tracks or our project as a whole and by the way we can also automate parameters in our plugins here as well. You really don't need to switch to Studio One as your main door to make use of the project page however if you do there's some deep integration which is really useful. Essentially when you update Studio One's songs used in the project the system is aware of this and updates the master files used in the project page. Clever. Now as you may imagine there are standalone products to deal with mastering. The main one that springs to mind is WaveLab which I have tried. Now I will say it's a very good program and it's focused on mastering but it's also rather complex and has a lot of features that a lot of us wouldn't actually use. That makes it less user friendly than the project page in Studio One and it doesn't have features which cover some of those broader tasks we've been talking about as well. Apart from all of that it's also a lot more expensive as a standalone program than Studio One professional is as a whole. Now talking about price you know one of the reasons I'm excited to have Sweetwater as a new sponsor for this channel is because I'm always hearing really good things about them and one of the things I hear commonly is that the sales staff sell you what is right for you rather than just selling you the most expensive item. That's a sign of a company that wants to have a long relationship with you and it also aligns really well with my own values because the last thing I want to do is recommend a product to you which is not going to be the right fit for you. That's why I'm happy to talk about the pricing for Studio One professional here at Sweetwater. Currently just for the next few days if you do buy Studio One professional it's $299. Now even at the usual price which I think is $399 it's still very good value for money. Now if you're convinced by the project page and you just want to go ahead and purchase Studio One professional outright follow the link in the description for that but I did promise you at the beginning of this video that I was going to give you a way to gain access to this feature for less than $15 at least to try it out. Prisonosphere is a product which includes not only Studio One professional and its project page but also some amazing notation software a whole heap of plugins and sounds some collaboration tools and also some cloud storage. If you head over to Sweetwater.com at the moment you can sign up for Prisonosphere for just $14.95 per month. You can try out all of the features we've talked about today plus all of the other things included in Sphere and if you don't like it you can cancel your subscription but if you love it like I do then you can continue. Check the links in the description down below. I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments down below. Are you going to continue to use your current door? Are you thinking about using this alongside it or are you now tempted to move over to Studio One professional completely? Love to hear about that. Now for me personally I do use a number of doors. I still really love Cakewalk. Sometimes I use FL Studio and I also use Studio One professional. Now if you think you're going to go down the Studio One professional route you may want to check out my sister channel which is called Studio One Revealed. You can see that right here.