bitflipper
Anderton
...I do find CW's analysis tools lacking, but when I put the final mixer/mastering album into Studio One to use its analytics, I can do a final reality check.
I think it's a fair assumption that anybody who's serious about doing their own mastering has acquired the necessary third-party analytic tools to allow you to master in whatever DAW you're comfortable with.
I feel no limitations at all when mastering a CD project in Cakewalk. Well, maybe just one: if you could insert indexes and then write an iso image directly from Cakewalk, that would be pretty cool. Does Studio One do that?
Studio One's mastering page (which is functionally separate from the multitrack song page, aside from the song/project linkage that's unique to Studio One) basically replaces a program like what was Sony's CD Architect,
not a program like CbB. It's an entirely different animal from mastering in a DAW; you can insert P and Q codes, export in multiple data formats, do CD-text, create disk images, and perhaps most importantly, both export
and import DDP files. Not a lot of programs can import DDP data, but sometimes you'll need to edit a master's metadata.
Also mastering analytics are a moving target. Studio One was quick to adopt flexible LUFS metering (as well as Bob Katz's metering). By the time you've bought all the required analysis tools, you might as well just pop for SO so you can do album assembly and DDP exports.
However, it can't do the deep waveform surgery that a program like WaveLab or Sound Forge can do. I use those for the "tough" cases.
I have no problem mentioning SO here in this context, because CbB doesn't compete with SO in respect to the mastering page, any more than CbB competes with Vegas because CbB has a video player screen. And for DJ mix-type stuff, SO's mastering page isn't anywhere near as flexible as doing album assembly in CbB (nor is Wavelab's "multitrack" Montage feature). Right tool for the right job...