Title: Mastering: Basic Music Mastering Tasks

Mastering:  Basic Music Mastering Tasks

To sell your music for commercial use, it is critical that you master your music tracks properly.  We are increasingly engaged in licensing activity where the music is heard "as is," without embedding it into a production. This includes usage for commercial background music services, as well as for the production of audio CDs. We must count on each of you to double-check that each track is properly mastered without undue silence at the beginning or end, with no clicks or pops anywhere within a track. If we discover these flaws, we are unable to export the track for any deals in the future, which will lose you $$$.  The issues listed below include only the very basics of mastering a music track, but are absolutely critical to your success as a composer.

If you need a software tool to help you fix these kind of problems, you can download an evaluation copy of Cool Edit 2000 from http://www.audiosparx.com/software.  Cool Edit 2000 is a great program for doing all kinds of basic mastering functions including removing clicks and pops at the start or end of a track, removing excessive silence at the start or end of a track.  The evaluation version is not time-limited, and does not expire; you simply have a subset of the available features (you choose which) each time you start the program.  This includes checking the following things:

• Make sure all tracks have only 200ms (1/5 of a second) silence at the start.  While it does not have to be exactly 200ms, it should only be a fraction of one second at a maximum.  This ensures that there's not an undue silence at the start of each track when it is included on a CD or in an in-store playlist.
   
• Make sure all tracks have no more than 1 or 2 seconds of silence at the end, so that there is not undue silence at the end of a track when it is included on a CD or playlist.  Ideally there should be only between 200 and 500ms silence at end.
   
• And please, REMOVE UNWANTED CLICKS OR POPS at the start, the end, or anywhere in the middle of your tracks.
   
• Don't turn up your mixes too loud.  A common practice when mastering tracks for radio play is to boost the volume up above the 90th percentile in the volume range.  DO NOT DO THIS FOR TRACKS YOU UPLOAD TO AUDIOSPARX!!  Keep your mixes below the red line, or with occasional peaks crossing the red line, but not persistently above the red line.  We see many young Hip Hop composers, and young composers in general, make this mistake.  By the same token, don't make your mixes too low in volume.