Mastering is one of the more little known aspects of the process of recording music. Most people are aware of overdubbing, editing and mixing, but comparatively few understand how critical mastering can be to add the final sparkle to a mix, how it can transform a pretty good mix into something amazing, or (sometimes, with a little luck) a poor mix into something tolerable.

In the professional world of record labels and recording studios, mastering is usually done using lots of very expensive outboard gear, as the final step before a master copy of a CD is sent to be duplicated into millions of consumer discs.

In the not necessarily professional world of home recording, mastering can done with a plug-in effect.

iZotope Inc., located near Boston, makes a remarkable plug-in called Ozone ($299, available for download at iZotope's Website, along with a free demo version). iZotope produces versions of it for most PC-based recording programs, as well for Pro Tools, the most popular professional recording system.

Jeremy Todd, the company's chief technology officer (and a musician himself--he was trained as a classical pianist) says, "Mastering in general is tough to put your finger on; I guess it depends on who you're talking to. But for the purposes of Ozone, we talk about everything that you do once you've got a stereo mixdown, to when you when you actually have a master and you say, 'OK, this is the audio, this is it, we're not touching it anymore.'

"With Ozone, we try to include everything that someone would need, so that, while it's not always the case, but in theory they could not use another plug-in; they could do it all in one."

How was mastering done before the days of computers and hard disk recording? Todd says:

There were trends established way back when, that are still present today. We're still seeing examples of these standalone hardware devices. Things were much more isolated, you wouldn't see as much all-in-one gear, and you'd have these big, honking pieces of equipment that were just an equalizer-and a two or three band equalizer at that, usually just a finalizer, a loudness maximizer.

Obviously, if you go back far enough, mastering was dominated by analog equipment. So with Ozone, we're trying to capture some of the flavor that people liked, which was a big challenge when it came to designing the DSP. It's very difficult for people to explain why they like their two-band analog equipment. So it boiled down to a lot of listening tests, and asking people a lot of questions.

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