Prepare Your Track for Mastering

Bounce your mix down as an interleaved WAV or AIFF file at the same sample rate and bit depth as your session. If your session was recorded at 48 kHz and 24 bits, bounce your mix down at 48 kHz and 24 bits. Ensure that the master output levels leave plenty of headroom. A mastering engineer might recommend −6 dB of headroom. If your master fader meters are hitting close to 0 dBFS constantly, that won’t leave the mastering engineer with much headroom and will make it more likely that clipping will occur when dynamic processing or Eq is used.