I'm getting close to finishing a lot of my songs and I'm down to just listening through them and putting vocals on the ones I'm happy with. Many years ago I used to love T-racks 24 for mastering but for many reason, it's unusable. What is the cheapest way of achieving what that program did? Is the way forward to now use mastering plugins rather than standalone?

I record using a Tascam 488 and I usually mix it down by plugging into my friend's sh*tty computer. Needless to say, it comes out sounding like sh*t.

What is a good, cheap program I can use to keep some of the fidelity that I am losing at the moment using my present system.