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You don't need any special software for mastering. There's nothing about mastering which you can't do better and more focused during the mixing process.

uh
isn't mastering a part of the mixing process?

Mastering was something you just did for vinyl originally. It's really redundant if the music is released on a digital format. But since a lot of people making a living from mastering probably wanted to keep their jobs...

The de facto definition of mastering today is more or less just applying EQ and compressors/limiters on the master channel. Sure enough there's nothing stopping you from doing that while you're mixing. But many people offer paid mastering services on tracks that have already been mixed and bounced by somebody else, so it benefits them to have it treated as a separate process.

I think mastering is mostly a destructive process, not saying you shouldn't do it if you really want to though. I would advise against investing in any mastering software though, I think it's just a marketing farce since what they offer is usually a EQ/Comp suite with tools you already have at your disposal. Like Coke Zero.

Last edited by geckoyamori (Jun 12, 2012 11:00 am)

Why Lolz?

Yes, there's a lot of old wives' tales when it comes to digital audio and the loudness war is particularly contentious, but when you A-B two compressors, limiters, EQ's etc. of greatly varying "quality" the difference is like night and day.

ANYWAY I really want to recommend endorphin to you, OP. The problem is that it doesn't have an AU version - only VST, so I don't know you'll be able to get it to work on OS X at all. It's seriously the best free mastering compressor and there's lots of comprehensive and insightful information about compression in general in the user manual.

Last edited by Victory Road (Jun 12, 2012 11:41 am)

I use Maxim on my master bus and potentially any EQ that sounds good.  It depends on what I'm doing.
Also, a lot of music you hear may or may not be over-compressed.  That's why, if you hear older music, it often is quieter than today's music.  Do what you can to make your mix sound "big" rather than loud.  You can and probably should compress a little bit.  Just don't overdo it.

This is mostly true.  It's still worth it, though, if you are really going for a professional-sounding recording.  I've seen really good mastering engineers work, and they know what they're doing.

It is, but if done right, it should be destroying only unwanted things.  Mastering engineers should have trained ears, first off, to pick out the frequencies that were potentially missed that sound harsh.  If a mixing engineer does his/her job well, the mastering engineer should not have to do much of anything at all.  But, most of us don't have super great equipment.  If you really want a great sounding mix, it pays to have someone monitor an album on high quality equipment and get rid of spikes in certain frequencies in certain areas of a song, etc.  That way you can bring your mix up to the level it should be at and not have frequency spikes causing your master meter to clip.

You also would potentially be getting rid of dead air, using a compressor/limiter to bring the top side of the dynamic range down to where the music peaks.  There is a reason even the top of the line mixing boards like the SSL 6000 series have stereo bus compressors.  People use them.