Essential Mastering

What should I expect from the Mastering process?

Mastering is your final opportunity to examine your project holistically and fine-tune it for your intended listener. It helps your album sound balanced from start to finish, and to translate evenly and predictably into any listening environment. Mastering can help address any shortcomings in your mixes, augment their strengths, as well as allow for edits, sequencing, crossfades, add density and definition, set your overall volume levels to play well along side other commercially produced recordings, and make full use of the sonic resolution available on your final medium, be it CD, vinyl, mp3, DVD, etc. Mastering provides the “glue” and vision that turns a collection of songs into an album; a balanced listening experience that feels right from beginning to end. Your tracks will be processed through a combination of our analog and digital outboard tools, and then sequenced and finalized using Magix Sequoia. Your final result (CDA or DDPi) guaranteed redbook-standard and can be used as a press-ready master by any reproduction facility.

What format should I deliver the music to you in?

We prefer to receive mixes as 24 bit data files (WAV or AIF, 44.1 to 96 kHz), or on 1/4″ or 1/2″ tape (15-30 IPS). We can work from data CDR’s & DVDR’s, USB flash drives, audio CD, DAT, MiniDisc, cassette, vinyl records, any device with analog, S/PDIF, AES, LightPipe, USB, or FireWire 400/800 connectivity. Please do not up or down sample your current file format if you are already working in the digital domain. Provide your mixes at whatever sample rate you’ve been working in. We recommend you bounce your mixes to 24 bit files even if you’ve been recording or editing with 16 bit sources. Data CDR’s and DVDR’s are preferred over audio discs because of their more reliable error correction design. At the end of the day, we can work with just about any kind of source material — if you are bringing in something non-standard, please contact us to make sure the necessary machines and cabling are available. As a rule of thumb, please perform as few transfers and format changes as possible, any kind of copy or transfer (other than a straight data copy) will degrade your materials.

How long does it take?

There are many factors that affect how long the mastering process will take. The length of the material, your preferred method of mastering (digital, analog, or tape), whether you would like to be in attendance, and the condition of the material presented. When you contact us to schedule a session, we will give you a specific date for your project. On average, an album takes one work day to master.

How do I deliver files online?

We use YouSendIt.com What are ISRC codes and how do I get them? ISRC codes are digital signatures that are embedded onto CD’s that allow for the tracking and management of songs in the digital domain. They are usually required by online music distributors such as iTunes. If you want them on your CD, you need to provide them to us before your master is finished — only the artist or label can obtain these codes, you must acquire them and send them to us. Please use this spreadsheet to provide us with your ISRC codes.
In Canada, contact the AVLA > Audio-Video Licensing Agency

In the USA, contact the RIAA > Recording Industry Association of America

Elsewhere, check the IFPI International Guide

How do I make my song titles appear on a computer?

There are two means of storing and sharing CD information (”metadata”), and they are often misunderstood and confused with one another: CD text is information encoded at the header (data portion) of an audio CD that can be used to store basic information such as artist, album title, song titles, and ISRC codes. This information is used only by the very small number of players that are cd text enabled — generally speaking this is for car stereos and home stereo components that have an LCD display built into them. CD text is not used by computers or iTunes. It is definitely not essential to include CD text on your master — if you are not 100% certain of how you want your song titles to appear, we recommend against encoding CD text. The CDDB (sometimes referred to as the Gracenote database) is an internet-based database that collects and distributes information about CD’s. This is the information that iTunes and other software players see. It is a user-updated database, it is your responsibility to see that the correct information is provided. Generally speaking, if you enter the information into iTunes yourself (or another software program that has an “upload to the CDDB” option), everything will appear as you intend it to, and this information will be shared with other users of the database. It can include much more information than artist / album / title data. See the following links for more information.
> Info on the Gracenote CDDB
> Applications that can submit to the Gracenote CDDB
> The freedb CDDB database FAQ and applications