Part 5

Building A DAW (Digital Audio Workstation)

Mastering Software...

After you get your tunes down what next? Well you mixed down your songs so they sound good to your ears and your ready to make a CD. You could just export your tracks to a stereo file and then use a third party CD burning app to make a CD. But if your trying to resemble a near to or professional recorded CD then you need to master those files and then assemble them to create a red book CD. A red book CD is a CD you can send to a company to manufacture your CD's for you. It's an industry standard that must be met to have a quality product.

Mastering is mainly cleaning up your files by the use of special filtering plug-ins or effects, such as finalizing compression, reverbs, stereo imaging, normalizing (volume, signal boosting or limiting) and such...
There are a few wav mastering and editing programs on the market today such as Sonic Foundry, Cool Edit, WaveLab. Of course I chose WaveLab.

WaveLab is a mastering and Red Book CD creating tool. It also has a feature called Audio Montage which is great for creating a seamless CD with cross fades and more

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