Quote:
Originally Posted by Sad But True
I seriously need to do some homework on mastering.
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If you haven't stumbled across these resources, they might help:
http://www.tweakheadz.com/mastering_your_audio.htm
TweakHeadz' guide to audio includes a mastering section. It's aimed at audio novices. There is a bit of stuff in there that I don't necessarily agree with, but it's an okay primer. Keep in mind that it's also a little bit out of date (Tweak died a couple of years ago, and while the site remains it's not going to be updated anymore).
http://www.massivemastering.com/html/faq.html
Massive Mastering (run by John Scripp) provides a pretty good blog about Mastering concepts, including this FAQ which gives you a general idea about the mindset of what makes a good finished mix for the process. It's not super-detailed, but can help you get started thinking about what the process is really about (handy hint: it's mostly
NOT about how 1 track sounds).
As mentioned a couple of times, Bob Katz's book (
Mastering Audio: The Art & The Science) is probably considered the home studio "standard" for this. It's common enough that you might be able to find it at a public library, but you might need to just cough up enough for a used copy from the Internet. Be forewarned, it assumes you have a pretty strong grasp of the fundamentals.
You could also check out the manual for Ozone, but as already mentioned it's not that great. Most of the ideas contained within are covered by the TweakHeadz guide.