If your track is worth stealing (trust me, it's probably not), then your label should be handling the mastering or at least advising you on a mastering house.

If a mastering house was stupid enough to "steal" your song, they wouldn't stand a chance in a lawsuit because you have the original project files, with date stamps, etc. They don't.

Finally, do a little research before sending it and find a reputable mastering house - check with some of the ones who have posted their services here or on the songs forum. If you're just sending it to "guy on the internet who does cheap mastering", then maybe it's a risk (but see above statement re: stealing).

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I.S.

It's called work ethic, treat mastering jobs as confidential....
All good ME's do this.

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Analogue Mastering
Esoteric sound for the discerning ear

Steal the track to do what? Upload it to beatport and if they're really lucky make a couple of dollars? Yeah, that's much better than actually doing the mastering work and getting a guaranteed couple of dollars.

As Inner Sanctum said, you have the original project files - you can split the audio into individual tracks to prove you have the original. If someone steals a song off you, they can't do that.

For mastering you wouldn't send an mp3 file - mp3s will discard parts of the sound. Send a good quality WAV or AIFF file.

You can leave master channel effects on if they are "creative" rather than "corrective", or just there to push the average level up. The mastering process will take care of the corrective and loudness-maximizing processes. Your song shouldn't clip anywhere (that is, it shouldn't hit 0 dB at any point), because mastering can't undo this damage.

Lastly, if your song doesn't sound incredible before going to mastering, don't expect it to come back sounding incredible. Mastering isn't going to fix bad sound choices, levelling decisions, untamed resonant frequencies on individual sounds, reverbs with too much low end, etc etc etc. (well, not without affecting other instruments).

quote:

Originally posted by utdarsenal so say I want to send a track to someone who master tracks- do you ever think about the possibility that he may steal the track from you?

Yeah, for this reason I NEVER send my tracks to ANYONE! And neither should you, be careful about this!

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http://soundcloud.com/subtara

quote:

Originally posted by Raphie It's called work ethic, treat mastering jobs as confidential.... All good ME's do this.

Is there a thread where you don't try and sell your mastering services?

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Stu Cox |

quote:

Originally posted by Stu Cox Is there a thread where you don't try and sell your mastering services?

Has nothing to do with me, or my work, but something you would expect from a ME in general

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Analogue Mastering
Esoteric sound for the discerning ear

Besides, Raphie does fkn awesome mastering IMO.

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Its beer appreciation month. Send me beer, I'll appreciate it.

Soundcloud

From what I've heard source files hardly hold up in court. Make sure you can prove you owned the track before anyone else did is the only way.

You can do that by sending the track abck to yourself by post mail. Or getting it date stamped by tax agency. The basic anti theft stuff.

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Storyteller Website | Storyteller @ Facebook | Storyteller @ Beatport | Storyteller @ Soundcloud | Stephen J. Kroos - Europa (Storyteller Remix)
Anthony Mea - Get It On (Storyteller Remix)

quote:

If less is more think about how much more more would be. -Frasier

upload it to soundcloud / youtube then mark it private. you can make it public and have a date stamp, beatport should at-least honor it... i think.

Let's be real here. The chance of some mastering person stealing your track is next to none, even if the track is really amazing. It's simply not worth their time. They make their money doing mastering, not writing tracks, something hardly anyone sees any money from in our genre, especially at our level. A mastering engineer's time is much better spent doing his craft that makes him money.

Furthermore, your label should be doing all of your mastering for you, making the whole issue of some random mastering person stealing your work, a null point.

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-Facebook- -SoundCloud-

Agreed.

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Storyteller Website | Storyteller @ Facebook | Storyteller @ Beatport | Storyteller @ Soundcloud | Stephen J. Kroos - Europa (Storyteller Remix)
Anthony Mea - Get It On (Storyteller Remix)

quote:

If less is more think about how much more more would be. -Frasier