<story><title>The Dark Art of Mastering Music</title><url>http://pitchfork.com/features/article/9894-the-dark-art-of-mastering-music/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Benjamin_Dobell</author><text>This is a long article that starts off stating that mastering is difficult to explain, and then proceeds to not explain mastering.&lt;p&gt;They&amp;#x27;re implying that poor mastering was to blame for Metallica&amp;#x27;s album. Weren&amp;#x27;t people complaining it was over-compressed? That&amp;#x27;s mixing &lt;i&gt;not&lt;/i&gt; mastering!&lt;p&gt;Mastering is a matter of making sure that listening to an album from start to finish sounds consistent. That&amp;#x27;s why songs that go on compilation albums are mastered once on the original album, and again on the compilation - they most certainly aren&amp;#x27;t mixed again.&lt;p&gt;Mastering may involve a small amount of compression across all components of the song (although it really shouldn&amp;#x27;t), but it&amp;#x27;s mostly controlling loudness, and loudness at different parts of the audio spectrum (more low-end, more high-end). Mastering is effectively something you could do yourself with your stereo&amp;#x27;s settings (if you were constantly adjusting the settings through-out the song), mixing is fundamentally different and consists of combining &amp;quot;tracks&amp;quot;; vocals, guitar, harmonies, drums, sound effects, adding samples over drums (i.e. mix in a better sounding drum, or hit there-of, over the drumming recorded for the song).&lt;p&gt;EDIT: For clarity, me stating:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Mastering may involve a small amount of compression across all components of the song (although it really shouldn&amp;#x27;t)&lt;p&gt;is my subjective opinion. Master-bus compression does happen regularly enough &lt;i&gt;during mastering&lt;/i&gt; (in addition to during mixing), but as stated, it is typically only a &lt;i&gt;small amount&lt;/i&gt;, compared to what a Mixing Engineer can get away with on a per &amp;quot;track&amp;quot; basis.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Dark Art of Mastering Music</title><url>http://pitchfork.com/features/article/9894-the-dark-art-of-mastering-music/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>neilh23</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s hard getting something that sounds consistently good in all listening environments - I&amp;#x27;ve seen cases where music is offered in digital format either as &amp;#x27;play anywhere&amp;#x27; loud .mp3s or 24-bit high dynamic-range .flacs for DJs, but most commercial music is mastered for the poorest environments (in the car, over the radio).&lt;p&gt;Getting a good master is very important - I&amp;#x27;m reminded of a story I heard about an album that was mastered by the artist, and pressed to CD with a high-pitched whine over the top which the artist hadn&amp;#x27;t been able to hear - like Aphex Twin&amp;#x27;s Ventolin, but unintentional.</text></comment>