So you have mixed your track and now it's ready for release, right ? Well in most instances music is mastered before it is sent for replication or duplication or simply distibuted online in it's final file format. Mastering has a number of goals, the predominant one is making the music translate to the widest number of reproduction systems possible as well as getting disparate tracks working as a whole on any given release.

Unless your monitoring and acoustics are full frequency range and accurate, chances are mastering will help your music translate whether it is played on laptop speakers, earbuds or a large sound system. Additionally, mastering seeks to create subjective enhancement with minimal side effects, terms such as adding punch, warmth, air, clarity, width and density to the end results sum this up nicely. Finally mastering is about quality control, catching clicks, pops, bad edits and other sonic defects before the listening public ever get to hear them.

Mastering music can be seen as the icing on the cake of a well crafted mix, mastering engineers will usually use a range of digital and analogue tools in order to achieve the best sound possible for any given mix. Common tools would be equalization, compression, mid and sides processing, de-essing, saturation, stereo width manipulation tools and limiting. These small, well judged adjustments add up up to create significant subjective improvements which lead to better end results.