DIY ‘ audio mastering at home’ is a tricky and complex process that takes years of experience to do it right. We all know your recordings can (and should) be mastered, and you have a home. But you can’t master your recordings at home. You can try, but you won’t end up with master quality results. First, briefly let me explain what CD mastering is. It is optimizing an already mixed stereo recording, so that it sounds as good or better in comparison with other CD’s or music of the same genre. It also means matching your songs on the disk so they all sound compatible with each other using very expensive and precise mastering equipment worth thousands of dollars. Software plug ins or a generic mastering preset are just not satisfactory to get the professional results for an artist that commands the attention of a music publisher, major label or retail record distributor in today’s competitive music market. Now the first step for mastering a song is to be equalized, then compressed. The compression stage brings up the average level so the song sounds louder, and then perhaps a final EQ stage to optimize the frequency contours. Is this easy to do? No way! The technical processes are easy enough, but to get it right is very difficult indeed. The chances are that you will end up with something worse than you started out with. In professional practice, music mastering is done by specialist mastering engineers. They spend their time doing nothing else and at times will master typically two projects in a day. Over the years, they gain a fantastic wealth of essential experience that you simply can’t gain at your home or from a home recording or mastering studio offering these type of audio services. And believe me there are a lot of them out there on the web promising professional results, but most projects end up with amateur sound or sub standard quality. I know, I often have to fix these problems. If you are really serious about getting the best from your recordings before you release them on CD, then you should pay for the services of a “pro” mastering engineer. That will be money well spent and less of a headache.