Exporting Your Files

We’re often asked how to prepare mixes or pre-masters for a session. Here’s a quick guide – unless you’re sending tape, in which case we’ll assume you know your onions.

File Format
Please send WAV or AIFF files – either split-mono or interleaved stereo are fine.

Sample Rate & Bit Depth
Use the sample rate of your original session; there’s no benefit in up-sampling. Bit depth, however, should be 24-bit or 32-bit float. Even if your recordings were originally 16-bit, your mix will have higher bit depth – so export at 24-bit or 32-bit float regardless.

Dither
If applying dither, make sure it matches the bit depth of your file. For instance, don’t use 16-bit dither on a 24-bit file. Don’t dither at all if you’re exporting at 32-bit float. If dithering to 24-bit, flat dither is recommended – avoid heavy noise shaping.

Normalisation
Please don’t normalise your audio. It doesn’t help, and for stems, it disrupts relative levels.

Start & End Points
Leave a little silence at both ends. Bounces that start right on the first beat can sound clipped or unnatural. Some DAWs even introduce random tails or glitches at the start of a bounce, so it’s best to leave space for those to clear, and we’ll be carefully tidying up the starts and ends of the tracks in the session anyway.

Level

We’re not concerned about exactly how much headroom you give us, so long as it’s not clipping or over compressed/limited. If it’s clipping, then the distortion may become unpleasantly audible once we start making changes, and overcompression or excessive limiting can also become more audible as EQ changes are made or at least prevent us from getting the best out of the mix.

Cleanliness

As mentioned above, the mastering process can reveal artefacts such as hidden distortion. It can also unearth other tiny unwanted sounds that may have gone under the radar during mix approval, such as clicks and pops at edit points and elsewhere. We have excellent tools for removing such gremlins, but it can be very time-consuming if there are lots of them so it’s best you keep things as clean and tidy as you can.

The Mix Bus

There are no hard rules here. If you're using mix-bus processing (e.g. compression or limiting), that’s fine – as long as you’re confident it’s working musically; but if you’re using a limiter just to make it loud, it’s better to leave it off or dial it back. As a general rule, the more processing you apply on the master bus, the less scope we have in mastering - but that’s fine so long as we don’t need to do much. If in doubt, send (or bring) both versions – with and without – and we’ll use whichever will sound best, or get in touch and we can have a listen and discuss it with you ahead of the session.

Mix Ref (Reference Mix)

 Most mixers provide two versions of each mix, one being a louder reference for the client and the other being the pre-master that goes to mastering. If you've approved a louder, limited version of your mix, please send that as well as the pre-master. It helps us to hear the version you’re happy with, especially if the file we master from is substantially more dynamic.

Alternative Versions

 Consider whether you might need Instrumentals, TV Tracks (no lead vocal), Radio Edits and so on. It’s cheaper to have us master those altogether rather than having to recall the session at a later date, so you might want to export those and send them in too. If you’re sending mix options such as Vocal Up or Vocal Down mixes, please let us know if you want us to master them or if they’re just provided as an option.

Final Checks

 Please listen through all files before the session. If sending stems, check that they sum to a complete and balanced mix.