Mastering: You Can Do It Yourself (Part Two) — Audio Plus

Jul 15th in General by Joel Falconer

In this week's Audio Plus content, Bobby Owsinski brings us the second of two tutorials on do-it-yourself mixing — this time looking at such topics as editing, fades, spreads, exporting and encoding. Bobby is the author of many best-selling audio books including The Mixing Engineer's Handbook.

To learn more about what you get as part of Audio Plus, read this. To take a peek inside this tutorial, hit the jump!

Author: Joel Falconer

Joel Falconer is a songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and frontman. While Joel's first love is writing and performing songs that touch on important and personal issues, programming, engineering and producing music in the studio are also strong passions.

"In the last tutorial we introduced mastering and a couple of its basic operations, level and frequency balance. This time we’ll cover some equally important but often overlooked elements, namely editing, spreads, and exports. Everyone but mastering engineers thinks that making a track sound better is the only job of mastering, but these other operations are mission-critical for a great product. Let’s take a look."

If you're not a Plus subscriber you may enjoy a recent video by Bobby on the subject of mastering. For a more advanced exploration, get the Plus tutorial.

Table of Contents

• Editing
• Fades
• Fade-Ins
• Fade-Outs
• Other Edits
• Spreads
• Export
• Multiple Masters
• Master Verification
• MP3 Encoding
• MP3 Encoding Tips
• The Encoder
• Bit Rate
• Bit Rate Settings
• Constant vs. Average vs. Variable Bit Rate
• Other Settings
• Exporting for iTunes

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