Here are some places to start learning about this:

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and check out massivemastering.com for some great articles on this subject.

massive thx man for u :)

Most of commercial material has been passed by the hand of expert Mastering Engineers, they used extremely expensive gear to do things right, loud and clean. Of course, there are several shortcuts for peolple like you and me and many others in this forum that can be done with few gear. I use a TC Electronics Finalizer to achieve high levels without distort the signal, it´s like to have a normalizer, a parametric eq, a multiband compressor, a multiband limiter and a lot of other processors in one box. It´s really cool for one-step and quick mastering. But, you can do much the same thing using a Wave editor (like Wavelab) and the right plug-ins (Waves L3 Multimaximizer, Izotope Ozone), and yet have AMAZING results. My recomendation is:

1. Don´t compare your project with another one commercially available, you can compare it if you´re a producer and you want to listen to drum sound and try to obtain that colour of drums for your project (for example). Why i tell you this? Everytime someone hears a rock CD, they want their project sound as loud as that CD no matter what....and you end killing all the dynamics that your recording might have. I will sound loud, but horrible.

2. Try always to have a nice mix BEFORE you get into mastering stage. Most people leaves important details to be fixed in the mastering stage....that´s fatal. Sometimes you can fix it, sometimes you don´t.

3. To achieve a nice mix, use dynamic procesing! There are for help u achieve best results! Use gates and compression for drums, compression on bass and so on, so your dynamics are well controlled, your mixes will be cleaner and louder by themselves!

4. In mastering reaching 0 dB is not the problem. Reaching a decent average RMS level is the challenge. Most editing programs lets you know the average RMS level of a song. Try to rock hard but also try not to over-compress your song. Leave some dynamics alive!

Hope this helps!

ya what odb said......... i learned some stuff jus bye readin that. thanx

0db wrote: It will sound loud, but horrible.

You see, just as there is different taste for music overall, there is different taste on the delivery of that music. What you call a song with good dynamic range, I call a song with lack of impact. It's not about just getting a loud mix; one can simply turn the music up, many people want to listen to music that is more in your face, and I don't think this is anything new. Growing up in the 80's and 90's (I was born in 1974) most people I knew set the graphic EQ in the smiley face pattern (boosting the highs and lows and cutting the mids) that would give you that "in your face" sound.
I've read in a number of forums the belife that the record lables are pushing hotter mixes on the listener, but I don't belive this is true. I think the lables are responding to what the people who buy CDs want. The reason I got into recording this year is that my band recorded a CD, played a bunch of shows, got on the local radio where our CD was played, sold many copies of our CD after our radio appearance, then had many unhappy customers who felt ripped off that the CD they bought sounded no where as good as it sounded on the radio. I go back to the studio and asked that the disc be remixed (this is before I knew about mastering) to sound more like it did on the radio, and the guy refused; going on and on about dynamic range.

Speaking of mastering programs, 0db mentioned waves for a program to increase RMS. How does Sound forge and CD architect do in this application? Right now that is the way I am looking at going for mastering software. My mixes sound good dynamically, but wayyy too soft.
Justin