[The Dougfather]

The idea of peak is that it lets you master a CD to the point where you would send it to a plant and get it reproduced professionally. You can add things like copyright protection, ISRC, cd-text & metadata. One part that is a real help is make up gain, if one track is slightly louder/quieter you can adjust the gain in the playlist, obviously you would try and master everything to a similar level but this just allows you to apply a final tweak. I also read something about in not so good CD players you can trigger a high pass filter which should in theory make your audio sound better , you sort of get an idea where its coming from.

You cant really compare peak to the waves plugs, for a start theres a major price difference. I have peak pro and the plugs you get are ok but nothing amazing, you get a nice compressor in the pro and some nice eq's but its more a fact that the features are unlocked (impulseverb etc). Its more of a fancy wave editor that you would ideally add the waves plugs to via VST. As much as i love Pro Tools its not a programme that i would try and master in. I like to be able to see whats going in with the waveform and the snag with Pro Tools is that you have to bounce then import to this.

If some of this stuff seems a bit overkill for you then i would recommend reading Bob Katz's 'Mastering Audio the art and science of' before making a big purchase. Its a top book dedicated to mastering and you'll get a true idea of what mastering really is.

Hope this helps

PS: You could probably get away with the LE version for you needs. Bias offer sidegrades from LE to Pro as well which is a great help. I now have Pro on the iMac and LE on the powerbook. This is perfect for the laptop because the LE version is not dongled whereas pro is. Believe it or not it actually worked out cheaper going down this road then it did buying the pro version right off the shelf.