Mastering Guidelines
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- Make sure you are completely happy with the sound of your mixes. Listen to
them in various environments (car stereo, boombox, computer speakers, living
room stereo, etc).
- Leave us 3-6 dB under 0.0 on your master mixdowns. This ensures that there won't be digital clipping and gives us the headroom we need to make your music sound as good as it can. Also, do not compress or normalize your mixes.
Send us the 16 or 24 bit wav or aiff files that you recorded and mixed down to (do not "upsample" your files)
-Sample rate should be 44.1 kHz
- MP3 / MP4 / AAC files are of significantly lower quality and should be avoided.
- Do not rip your CD using i-Tunes
- Conversely, do not use iTunes to burn your CD (it converts files to AAC format, degrading sound quality). If you do use iTunes, ensure that "Sound Check" is unchecked in preferences as well as in advanced preferences (this will reduce output volume)
- Instead, use roxio toast, nero ahead, or equivalent application to burn your CD

-If you will be mastering for vinyl, please contact us first

ISRC (International Standard Recording Code) is a “digital fingerprint” that’s permanently encoded onto a CD. It’s used as an identifier for royalty collection and rights administration. To apply for your own ISRCs, visit www.cria.ca (Canada), www.riaa.com (USA), www.ppluk.com (UK). While not technically necessary, having ISRC codes makes the logging of radio plays and royalty collection more rapid and secure.

SONG NAMES & ITUNES- If you would like for your songs to correctly be identified in iTunes (and other computer-based players), you'll need to enter your information (song name, artist, genre, album title, etc.) in their CDDB database via internet connection.