News

Mastering for everyone

Just can't get that presence and vibe in your recordings that you long for? Spent ages and tremendous amounts of cash looking for that one mastering device that will bring your audio to its fullest potential? Don't despair; the solution is right under your nose, and it has been there for ages. It's called: iTunes.

According to the New York Times, famed guitarist Ry Cooder found himself in the all too familiar dilemma described in the beginning of this entry while applying the finishing touches to his latest album My Name is Buddy. When putting the album to the car stereo test, things weren't really happening. The music just didn't glue together the way it should. To quote: "It started to sound processed. We were losing the feeling of the thing, and this is not music that can withstand this."

Mr. Cooder and his technicians did discover, however, that when listening to the CD burnt in iTunes, the problems solved themselves. It appeared that they had left iTunes to its default preference of applying their so called Sound Enhancer effect when burning the CD. Apparently, this was just what the doctor ordered. Everything sounded fine.

They ended up using nothing but the Sound Enhancer to master the whole album. And thus, a piece of consumer hifi freeware ended up outperforming all of those multi-$ pieces of equipment usually found in mastering studios.