Music Mastering Software
processes your audio files

This is what people sometimes refer to when talking about mastering

Music mastering software programs, in most cases, are designed to run in a host editor, and are generally referred to as 3rd party plug-ins. Some hosts do provide their own audio mastering software built into their programs, such as Steinberg's Wavelab.

However, because plug-in designers focus directly on a certain process, they're considered to be higher quality.

Some of the primary companies putting out this type of software include: Roger Nichols Digital; iZotope; Universal Audio (also known as UAD); Waves; Voxengo and Harbal which is actually a stand alone music mastering program and not a plug-in due to the complexity of what it does. There are others, but for now let me tell you what's involved.

Mastering software manipulates the audio in various ways. (You can also hear it called signal processing).

This can include equalization (eq), compression, and limiting. It also includes expansion, imaging, and more specialized enhancement processes, like tape simulation or tube saturation. One of my favourite plug-ins of this type is Steinberg's Magneto plug-in which provides amazing tape saturation simulation.

And, finally, one of the most important audio mastering procedures, dithering, is necessary when creating an audio CD.

Not all companies offer the same set of plug-ins. And, you won't necessarily need to use each and every type of process. Each have their own individual way of addressing music (or audio) mastering.

Roger Nichols Digital has a really innovative and unique way of providing compression with the D4 plug-in.

As mentioned, Harbal, not a plug-in, provides detailed frequency analysis to primarily address eq problems – but it also has a special two-stage limiter within its program.

Voxengo probably offers the widest assortment of music mastering software ranging from the most transparent processing to the most colourized processing, with many more options to tweak settings in each program.

I should add that, while I'm discussing this software within a mastering context, many of the plug-ins can perform double-duty and be used on individual tracks in a mix. But in the case of something like iZotope's Ozone plug-in, which is a dedicated mastering “suite”, it would be overkill.

With high profile mastering engineers like Bob Katz and Roger Nichols designing dedicated, specialized mastering plug-ins (the K-Stereo and Detailer, respectively), the future's starting to sound very bright for music mastering software!

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