One of the questions we get a lot in class is "What Is Mastering?"

This process can sometimes seem a little vague and confusing to newcomers in the audio world. I like to describe it as the last step in the recording process and the first in the manufacturing process. Although it's sometimes the least understood part of the production process it still can be the most important. A lot of times you'll hear people equate mastering with making a mix "louder". Although that can be a by product, it's not the overall goal.

A mastering engineer's job is to a polish an album from start to finish, making each song sound consistent to the next, as well as fix any remaining technical issues and assemble the songs into the desired order. It's important when mixing an album not to go crazy with bus compression and other processing on the two mix. This leaves space for you or whoever else is doing the mastering to have the necessary headroom for further processing. This processing can consist of multiple tools including compression, EQ, and limiting.

Another job of a mastering engineer is to provide a PQ coded disc to the replication plant after assembling the album. These digital codes must be present on a final master. They include information that are embedded in the master so that the manufactured CDs can be read by all CD players. These information sub-layers can contain song times, cd-text info, ISRC codes, etc. Programs like Pro Tools will not burn a coded disc so it would be necessary to use an alternate program like Bias Peak, which is a powerful, reasonably priced application for Mastering.