Don, I will be with you in a little while (couple of hours). In the meantime, I suggest you read the headphone post here:

(Dead Link Removed)

For it is not the program that will give you the results, it is the total experience of the operator that will.

For a great beginner's overview of mastering - along with a simple and fairly cheap plug-in that does it all - I recommend the Ozone plug.

http://www.izotope.com/products/audio/ozone/guides.html

You can download the user guide for free, and unlike most user manuals, they really go in depth with the techniques and explain the basics of mastering first, and how to use their plug-in second. They have a free demo download, too, that adds little noise pops every 10 seconds, but everthing works, so you can hear it for yourself. My only gripe with the manual is that they seem to push multi-band compression as more important in mastering than single-band compression. Other then that, they make great recommendations about general starting settings, but above all, they emphasize that it always depends from song to song. In other words, they are very humble about their one-size-fits-all presets.

This is from their website:

"If you don’t have Ozone but want to learn more about dithering or mastering, we still hope these guides will help you. Sure, we think you should use Ozone, but we learned a lot about mastering from “the online audio community”, and we want to give something back in return."

So they just have a good attitude about it.

Of course, this all-in-one plug-in is not high-end stuff, but it sounds perfect for what you need.

The plug-in includes (along with descriptions of how each tool is used):

EQ, master reverb, harmonic exciter, stereo imager, compressors, loudness maximizer.

Hope this helps.

Thanks for the replies so far.

About the Ozone plug-in - it looks great, but I don't have any programs on my computer to begin with.

I do all of my recording and mixing in my digital recorder.

Is there a program where I can dump my finished "mixed" song into it, and still master it from this stage?

Also, any recommendations for studio monitors (hopefully around $200 or less.)

Thanks for all of the help!

As far as free audio tracking programs go, Audacity is my favorite:

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/download/plugins

This page I've linked you to explains about how to enable VST plug-ins to work in Audacity. Now you just need to import your stereo mix into Audacity, install the VST version of Ozone, and master away!

audiowkstation -

I'd like to speak to you over the phone sometime to discuss the possibility of having some of my tracks mastered by you.

Cheers.

Been busy (today of all days) so this is why I did not get back to this post..and I have a few more hours to go. My number is on my web site and I am on central time. Anytime you want to speak, I can set aside some time. My email is there as well..so email me first so I can turn on the phone and you won't get the answering service.

:)

More crappy suggestions that I have suggested before for crappy mastering purposes. T-Racks standalone 2 track mastering program. The presets sound awful. Way too overblown sounding.

Use your own judgment. Very easy to abuse this mastering software. You can make things too too loud! Less is more. The distortion control adds 2nd harmonics, use very sparingly.

A lot of people think this software is substandard. I think it's great in the right hands! Too many heavy-handed engineers out there.

Remy DON'T TOUCH ME THERE Ann David