Questions Of Whether To Do Certain Things At Mixdown Or At Mastering

[Mike Freze]

Hi! I have a question my books don't seem to specify very well.

When you mixdown all your individual tracks in a project to a single, stero file to export, you select the final bit rate, sampling rate, etc.

When you call up your completed songs to master later on (each complete song on a different track in your program), after you are done fine tuning the volume levels, EQs, compression, sequencing, and all that, when you are done mastering your own work, do you need do any bouncing at this stage? Or do you just merely "save" your adjustments to your hard drive with the same file name you gave on your mixed files? Is dithering down from higher bit and sampling rates (for CD production) all done at the mixdown level before retreiving your songs to be mastered? Or should that be done only at the end stage of the mastering?

Thanks for your time. Mike

 

[SouthSIDE Glen]

Dithering doesn't need to be done because of a sample rate change, it's a downsize in the word length (e.g. 24-bit to 16-bit) where dithering takes hold. As such the only real place it really needs to be done in after mastering and after you have truncated the word length.

There is a school of thought that advises dithering individual tracks before performing the mixdown in mixing where you've used floating point plug-ins to change the tracks. I'm not sold on that idea myself; it's extra steps and work with next to no definitive positive results in most cases; IOW not worth the effort in my book, but that just one opinion there.

As far as saving files, absolutely save a version of the "final" master. That's what you just spent all that work recording, mixing and mastering to create; to not save it would be to have wasted all your time And personlly, I like to save a file version at the end of just about every major stage of the process. You never know when you'll want or need to go back to them in the future.

G.

 

[mixsit]

When you call up your completed songs to master later on (each complete song on a different track in your program), after you are done fine tuning the volume levels, EQs, compression, sequencing, and all that, when you are done mastering your own work, do you need do any bouncing at this stage? Or do you just merely "save" your adjustments to your hard drive with the same file name you gave on your mixed files? ..

It seem what you're getting at here is yes- you would have to render the changes in some way (either as a process to the track or a bounce' (mix down) to a new track.
And since you're going to be adding additional processing to these pre-master tracks you'd want to have imported them at full res, and save the bit reduction and dithering for the last step.