Practical Recording Techniques, 7th Edition

Chapter 20 Mastering and CD Burning

DOI: 10.4324/9781315696331-20

After recording several mixes, you can save them separately as they are, or you can master an album or demo of those mixes. Mastering is the last creative step before creating the final CD for CD duplication or replication, or creating the final song files for upload to the Web. In mastering you edit out noises or false starts before the beginning of each song, put the songs in the desired order, insert a few seconds of silence between songs, and make each song the same loudness and roughly the same tonal balance. The goal is a consistent sound from track to track, so that everything flows better and the album sounds unified. You also might try to make the mastered program as ...