You say that the project that's already been mastered? I'm assuming then it's just the audio that's been mastered, and it's in individual tracks ready for a digital release? Then you're already at a headstart when approaching a mastering engineer as it can be a quick job so they may be able to fit you in easily. Mistakes at this point can mean CDs being coming out of duplication with wrong or incomplete information, CDs not playing properly, or short and very loud bursts of noise. This part of the process is an objective 'don't make any mistakes' job not a subjective 'I don't like that compression' role so you really should be going to someone who knows what they're doing. It's too much to learn on-the-job (and too much to get wrong) over the course of one high importance and highly time critical project.ĭon't think of going to a mastering engineer as 'outsourcing' but rather going to a professional that knows a very particular set of skills for a very particular job that you don't know how to do. Unfortunately, as there are no exotic eqs and compressors and it's easy to make mistakes at this part of the process it's part of the very unglamorous side of mastering that no one really sees or cares that much about.įor what it's worth I used to be a full time mastering engineer (had to give up due to an unfortunate long term illness that nibbled at my hearing) and my advice is: if you've never made a CD before at this level then go to a mastering engineer.

You still have to create a CD in your mastering DAW (so you place the individually mastered tracks, decide on fades, make sure the starts and ends don't fall inbetween CD frames, place index markers, etc.) but, once that's all been done you write a DDP rather than burn a master CD. It contains the exact same information and data that is created when you create a CD master but it is arranged in digital folders and is not dependant on a physical disc (so you can zip it up and send it over the web or transport on a USB stick or whatever).

As the wiki text bot has pointed out here, a DDP (or DDPi) is a digital mastering format.

Ddp creator pro