Mastering is the most mythologized stage in music production: outsiders think it means making a track loud, and that is the one thing it should no longer be about. This is an honest account of what mastering engineers actually do, the loudness war that distorted the craft for two decades, how streaming-loudness normalization quietly ended it, the deliverable formats that differ for vinyl, CD, and streaming, and where the line between mixing and mastering really sits.
Loudness
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What Mastering Engineers Actually Do