Long Way Home

[Mixinthecloud]

I love mastering. Not doing it myself, mind you. I 'finalize' because I'm not a mastering engineer but man they've made mixes so much better over the years. There should be a similar site for mastering engineers where we can send mixes that they can practice on...

I've tried most of the on-line mastering services and can't say they return something any better than what I can do for myself. I just started using Izotope for mastering and will do two of their automated mixes (one for streaming, one for not streaming). and one manually setting only the desired loudness in LUFs and doing everything else manually. I think it works. Looking at their curves from their automated processing is somewhat enlightening. I get happy when they do things like .2 db broad adds or subtractions to my master. When they need to do nothing major it makes me feel like I'm on the right track.

We should have a discussion about playback level and how that affects mixes and masters.