James Anderson is the Sr. Mastering Engineer here at The Bit Farm. For more than 40 years, he’s been practicing the art of audio.
In brief, mastering is the preparation of your final music mixes (either in stereo or multi-channel) for distribution as a CD/DVD/Blu-ray optical disc, a vinyl record, MP3, Apple Music, Amazon Music and other electronic music distribution or streaming mediums.
Mastering makes good mixes sound great and makes great mixes sound fantastic.
Mastering can not change things like instruments or vocals being too loud in the mix.
All mastering here at the Bit Farm is done with a unique hybrid blend of analog and digital processing. That workflow creates a beautiful natural-sounding final product.
The mastering process starts with a critical listening pass through your music, then tracks are laid out in the sequence you provide to us. Careful processing like EQ, multi-band compression, stereo image enhancement and limiting are added to each song, bringing a cohesive and consistent overall tone and volume level to your mixes. Next, the fade-in and fade-out of each song is carefully addressed and the timing between each song gets decided. Finally, the track IDs or PQ codes get assigned and metadata (artwork, album/artist name. ISRC) is tagged to each song. Then those songs are exported as 24-bit files for electronic music delivery as well as 16-bit files delivered as a DDP (Disc Descriptor Protocol) for CD.
The Bit Farm Is A Certified Apple Digital Masters Content Provider.
Mastering also involves the assignment of an International Standard Recording Code (ISRC) to each track. ISRCs are the digital fingerprint for each song you create.
The Bit Farm is a registered ISRC licensee, so creating that metadata for you is a breeze.
Learn more about what ISRCs are and how to purchase one HERE.