Pre-Master

Music And File Preparation For Mastering

In order to gain the best possible sound out of mastering, it is important to deliver suitable mixes or versions and well-prepared files to the mastering facility. To help you optimize your mixes and prepare for mastering, you find below a listing of the major aspects to look at before uploading your files to our server.

Reference Songs

To be ablle to create the sound you are looking for, we ask you to provide some details that help us understand what sound exactly you desire for your masters. The information required, includes your preferred mastering style, comments to each song if you like and some general music references, that provide us an idea of the sound you love. It is our ambition to best meet your demands for sound and quality.

As you probably have a clear idea how you want your masters to sound like, it is important that you tell us. By providing some music reference details, such as a number of songs or an artist's album that you would like your music to sound similar to, we can work more effectively to achieve the sound you desire for your masters. This way we can specifically tune your music to match the sonic characteristics of the sound you love.

File Preparation

Often regarded as a minor aspect, file preparation, in fact represents a major element of the mastering process. For us to work effectively and have all necessary files quickly at hand, we ask you to sort and name the files in a logical order. This is especially important for stems of certain mixes. The best approach is to set up a folder structure in your file browser. Later this entire folder can be dragged and dropped and uploaded to our server as it is.

For the folder structure, the parent folder should be named after the project ("artist name" - "album title"), the subfolders should be named after the song titles or in case of a compilation again after the artist and song title ("track number" - "artist name" - "song title"). Inside each song folder should be the versions or stems of the song. The single files should provide details of the content, such as version name or stem name ("track number" - "song title" - "version or stem name"). A file name could look like this then:

"03 Empty Trash-Watch Out-TVMix.aif"

Once you have set up the folder structure and named the files accordingly, it is a good idea to create an archive of the files. The archive can be furthermore compressed using .zip, .rar, .gz, or .sitx file archiver, saving you precious upload time. The just named compression formats are lossless formats, meaning that the files after compression are still identical copies of the originals. No loss of data or sound quality occurs.

File Format

We highly recommend sticking to the most commonly used file formats, such as AIFF (.aif), Wave (.wav) or Broadcast Wave (.bwf). Those formats ensure highest quality and compatibility. Mixes and stems should be delivered as stereo interleaved files, although dual-mono files can be processed as well, but are simply not as convenient to work with.

Bit depth