You need to be able to preview in realtime
I meant there probably isn't a need for hard realtime, ie neglible
latency. There's always going to be some latency with a preview, if
you're making a copy of the original audio to mangle, isn't there?
But I see what you mean - with a CPU intensive processing job done in
non-realtime, you could master a track on quite modest hardware.
Ardour doesn't really have the tools you need:
very accurate meters
and (arguably) linear filters.
Does Jamin use the meters from the jack meterbridge, or does it have
it's own?
It seems in the pro audio world there are specialist tools for
mastering jobs, so this seperate app approach seems reasonable here.
However, this could be a historical consequence of the fact that a
mastering engineer is a different person from the recording engineer.
Maybe mastering engineers are just ex-recording engineers who prefer
not to deal directly with musician's egos any more.
Cheers
Daniel