the finishing touches - usually done by a highly trained engineer listening on very high-grade speakers in a finely tuned room.
*final tweaking with high quality processers (such as compression and EQ) to make the project sound as good as possible, and be playable on a wide variety of systems.
*ordering of the songs
*balancing the volume of each song so it is proportionally loud (or soft) compared to the rest of the songs on the project. And often(sometimes unfortunately) making the overall project competetively loud compared to other CD's in the same genre.
*fine tuning fades and cleaning up any extraneous noise
*formatting the project, if necessary, to CD-compatible 16 bits and 44.1 khz, using high quality dither.
*preparation of a master that will be sent to be duplicated
