- Final volume between -20 and -15 LUFS
- -5 dBFS maximum peak (recommended)
- No plugins on the master bus (except volume meters, goniometers, etc.)
- No fades (in or out)
- Export with the same bit depth and sample rate as the project
- Wav, AIFF, FLAC or ALAC formats
If you want to know more about these requirements, keep reading.
Maximum volume from -20 to -15 LUFS
One of the most common situations that we encounter is the search for a higher volume when sending a song to be mastered, but if you want it to perform correctly on streaming platforms (Spotify, iTunes, YouTube, etc.), the volume of your song does not it should exceed -13 LUFS. Read more about volume in mastering.
For this reason, the closer to this value you deliver your mixes, the less space you leave us to work with (headroom) and of course, the less volume difference you will find between the mastered and the unmastered material.
Usually when a mix comes with too hot it's because the monitoring system has not been calibrated and the engineer does not know exactly what volume he is working at. Consider that after a few hours of working on a mix, the brain will perceive a lower volume due to hearing fatigue and the most common practice is to turn up the volume of the signal instead of either resting your ears or raising just the output volume and not the signal.
Avoid plugins on the master bus
Except for measurement plugins like volume and mono-stereo correlation (goniometer), having something else on the master track affects the entire mix; generally these plugins appear as a consequence of turning up the volume (read the previous point), and can be compressors and / or limiters (maximizers). We recommend that you remove these plug-ins, and if the signal exceeds the recommended values or reaches the digital clip, simply lower the fader of your master bus until it reaches the indicated value –it generally corresponds to 0 dB on the fader scale.
There are other cases in which equalizers are added to give a certain "color" to the mix, this is not necessary when it is going to be sent to mastering since we have equalizers designed to handle complete mixes, you can trust is with handling the EQ curve with the utmost care.
Another important thing is that if you use an EQ on the master bus and it is not designed for mastering, it will end up introducing a lot of distortion, known as Intermodulation, one of the most damaging types of distortion for music.
Avoid fades
When you send your material to be mastered with us, we take care of applying fade-ins and fade-outs for each song –we have very precise tools to carry out this task, respecting the natural decay of the instruments.
There are some people who think that they should "turn off" the residual sound at the end of each song, however this is not necessary and allowing the natural decay of the instruments sounds very aesthetic.
Export your files with the same resolution
Most recording studios work at 48 KHz, we work with the highest resolution recommended for mastering (96 KHz) so many engineers feel committed to change the sample rate from 48 to 96 when bouncing, this is not necessary since we will do this conversion for you, in fact, unless you hire the In The Box service, all our masters will go out to the analog domain and will be captured back at 96 KHz, that is why we recommend you to send your mixes with the same resolution with which you worked the project, be it 44.1, 48, 88.2, 96, 176.4 or 192 KHz.
In the case of bit depth it is not necessary to go beyond 24, if your project at 16, send as it this, but in all cases do not exceed 32 bits, it does not improve sound quality at all.
For sample rates, the higher the better, but for bit depth, going higher than 24 bits will not bring any improvement.
PCM or Lossless Formats
It also seems obvious but always send your files in PCM, that is, Wave (.wav) or AIFF (.aiff) since it is essential that information remains intact, as opposed to lossy formats such as mp3 and AAC (.m4a). If you want to save transfer time or space, use Lossless formats like FLAC and Apple Lossless (ALAC) as they contain exactly the same information as a PCM but in half the space.
For quality reasons, we will not be able to process your music if it is sent in any format other than those mentioned.
Follow these recommendations and you will see that your masters will have a better sound; remember that the better the mix, the better the master.
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