Abbey Road Upgrades On-line Mastering & Mixing Services

London’s world-famous recording complex Abbey Road is launching new, improved on-line mastering and mixing services with a completely rebuilt, more elegant file-sharing interface that allows users to send and receive tracks more easily. The result is a faster, thoroughly modern service allowing musicians around the globe easier access to the studio’s world-class equipment and internationally renowned team of engineers, with feedback and communication between customers and engineers at the heart of the experience.

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The evolution of audio mastering

Historically audio mastering was a procedure which took a set of mixes and ensured that they would work on the vinyl format for release to the general public. The vinyl format requires specific technical criteria to be met in order to successfully create a lacquer in order to make vinyl copies. The last thing you want is a skipping record, sibilance on vocals or a wasted test pressing because the songs do not fit on one side. In addition the music would sometimes be tweaked to ensure good compatibility for radio broadcast which was is important for the promotional needs of the record label and artist. Today for mastering  we have a number of digital formats that include CD, digital .wav and .aiff files and also compressed file formats such as MP3, Ogg Vorbis and AAC.  

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MaximalSound Evolves

Since 2010, MaximalSound.com offers an online audio optimization service. Based on a proprietary algorithm, this service allows indie productions, labels and musicians to release their tracks complying with the highest industry standard. This processing uses the same pattern as the human hearing. It supports every music genres from metal to hip-hop, from classical to country music.

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Online mastering - advice on choosing the right service for your music

Online mastering studios have been around for a number of years now and many musicians maybe be attracted to the lower prices. There is no doubt that saving some money is on a lot of peoples minds these days. This is understandable, however the online mastering services you can find on the internet are wide and varied along with the pricing that you can find. As an operator of a professional online mastering studio myself I find it quite alarming when looking at the websites of some people offering online mastering services. It is very obvious to a mastering professional what studios seem ill equipped or lacking in experience and skill that mastering requires. As such I thought it would be a good idea to list some of the things to look out for when choosing mastering. Firstly I will clarify what mastering is. Mastering is preparing a body of music works for final release medium. This involves fades, spacing, tonal sonic tweaks, tweaks to the dynamic range of the material, entering sub code data such as ISRC codes and UPC/EAN codes  and quality control. (click, glitch removal etc) A master format might be a CD-R pre master disk or a DDP file or .wav and MP3 files.

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Digital audio workstation back up strategies for musicians

I think most of us have been there, one day your computer simply does not switch on or it switches off in the middle of a session and will come back on. Fact is when it comes to computers and especially their hard drives it is a case of when, not if, the hard drive is going to break. A hard disk drive is made of spinning plates and this requires a motor, this motor has a finite number of mechanical spins before it stops spinning.As such back ups make a lot of sense, the man hours that are lost when a computer breaks can be colossal. Not to mention the potential loss of a lot of work and creative ideas which could hold significant monetary and personal value. There are a number of solutions available. There are 2 things you need to back up on a typical digital audio workstation computer.  Audio data, your recordings and samples, these files are constantly being increased in number. Then we have the system drive which holds your operating system and software installations. For this I recommend 1 of 2 methods,  software cloning/imaging of the drive or hardware cloning.

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Why the Loudness Wars Still Matter

It’s hard to believe that in 2011 the loudness wars are still an issue. For the past decade or more, mastering engineers have been fighting against the race to 0dB (and beyond) in an effort to right the wrongs of the 90s. But records are still released that have had all the life compressed out of them. Why?

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