Online mastering services have taken the industry by storm over the past several years. These automated systems promise professional mastering, delivered instantly—all for a very reasonable price. This is attractive and convenient to artists looking for fast, affordable turnaround. Aria…
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What Is a True Peak Limiter?
True peak levels differ from the volume we read in our DAW. In digital audio, we understand the absolute ceiling to be 0dBFS (decibels relative to full scale), and any signal above that can cause clipping. We can push a…
The Loudness Penalty by Streaming Services
Streaming services like Spotify and others normalize the volume of all the material on their platform. This is so you’re not constantly turning the level up or down from song to song. However, tracks you’ve mixed may not play back…
The 11 Best Mastering Plugins in 2023
When it comes to mastering in-the-box, you’ll want a great compressor, a limiter, an EQ, and most of the stuff you’re already familiar with for mixing. Many of the best mastering plugins combine the parameters you’ll need into a single…
eMastered Review: How Good Is Their AI Mastering?
Online mastering services are becoming key components in the evolution and further democratization of music production. The premise is that you upload a mix, the robot works its magic, and boom—industry-standard quality. If you’re wondering how artificial intelligence could replace…
Stem Mastering Explained
If you’ve heard “stem mastering” mentioned in recent years, you’re not alone if you’re wondering what the heck it means! We’ll take a quick look at the “regular” mastering process and how stem mastering differs from it. Let’s refresh. What…
How to Master a Song at Home with These Simple Steps
Mastering is the last step in preparing a song or album for release. The overall sonic aesthetic should be well established by the time a song reaches mastering. What you or a dedicated mastering engineer can do is make final,…
Song Mastering: Preparing Your Tracks to Master
Song mastering is the final step in getting your tracks ready to release. What a mastering engineer does differently than a mixer is make final, sometimes very subtle, tweaks to make something sound polished and “commercial.” You can learn how…
Mastering in the Box – Tutorial & Plugins
If you plan to put the final polish on your mixes at home, you’ll need to understand mastering in the box. Some techniques involve things like additional EQ, compression, M/S processing, and limiting to finalize a song before release. Generally…
How to Master a Song: Understanding the Goal of Mastering
Mastering is the final step in preparing a song or album for commercial release. This means that it takes place after mixing, so the overall sonic aesthetic should be well established by the time a song reaches mastering. What a mastering engineer…
Optimizing Mixes for Streaming
We recently had the opportunity to sit down with the incredibly talented Warren Sokol to talk about mixing/mastering for streaming release. Some of the main topics we covered are LUFS metering, the different codecs streaming services use to encode masters,…
What Is Dithering | How Is It Used for Music Production?
There’s lots of terminology in digital audio that we’ve heard before, but aren’t quite sure what it is or how it works. If dither, or “dithering,” is one of those terms for you, you’re not the only one! Dither is…
Are Online Mastering Services Worth It?
Automated online mastering tools like BandLab, LANDR, and eMastered all offer “instant results at a fraction of the cost of studio mastering.” There’s definitely a bit of skepticism surrounding online mastering, and understandably so. Anyone who’s familiar with the process at…
Should you mix your own tracks? | FAQ Friday
We're back with another FAQ Friday! Today's featured question is this: I'm a little confused about what is good enough when it comes to a final mix before mastering, when the mix is clean enough, or what to leave for…
Peter Doell Is One of the Most Talented Mastering Engineers Ever!
A complete transcription of the interview can be found below: Warren Huart: Hello everybody, I hope you’re doing marvelous today. Sitting here with my good friend Mr. Pete Doell. How are you? Peter Doell: I are good, thank you so…
Piper Payne: Mastering Engineer and Vinyl Technologist
Piper Payne is a mastering engineer, educator, and active member of the audio community based in Oakland, CA and Nashville, TN. The biggest recent update from Piper is the company she started in Oakland (Neato Mastering) has now joined famed Infrasonic…
Getting a Track Ready for Mastering | FAQ Friday
We’re back with another episode of FAQ Friday! As always we have a ton of marvellous questions this week! Our featured question this week: "When mixing down a multitrack song recorded at 24-bit/ 96kHz, what is the best method to…