While music mastering duties are entirely doable in the mix engineer’s DAW, mastering engineers frequently opt for a dedicated platform. We use one solution that hopes to expand its reach beyond its own post-production instincts.

Mastering - Why Use A Dedicated DAW?

While many engineers can find themselves mixing and providing mastering-style processing for the client, the relevance of a dedicated separate mastering stage remains. This stage in music production is as much about providing a fresh creative perspective on the final output, as providing the expected technical functions of quality control and corrective processing. Using a dedicated DAW for mastering can offer these facilities without the redundant extra functionality of a production-focused DAW.

There are some established favourites for mastering tasks, such as Pyramix, and WaveLab Pro, however, at their essence, they provide the tools to assess quality, edit, and process audio accordingly in a similar way to the production-style DAW, as well as adding extra audio formats and authoring facilities to the mix. Any suitable candidate will bring some or all of these features regardless of the name on the tin.

Choosing An Alternative Candidate

More recently, Acon Digital’s Acoustica has been making waves in the post-production community by taking on the more established options for tasks such as audio editing and cleanup. At its heart is an ethos to provide functional tools that compare well with the competition. These are delivered using a business model that sees users get free non-integer upgrades with significant improvements and features such as ARA 2 added - something that users of other platforms don’t always offer. The company suggests that their Acoustica audio editor should not be overlooked on music mastering duties, thanks to its suite of processing and restoration tools that are gaining ground among post users.

We tried Acoustica on mastering duties. In a familiar scenario, we employ Acon Digital’s DeClip 2 algorithm to reconstruct a missing peak, before applying some light touch compression and EQ courtesy of the Dynamics and Equalize 2 modules. We then tweak the impossible using a little magic…

Acon Digital On Acoustica

Acoustica 7.4 - now with new ARA2 Plug-in. Acoustica 7 is the perfect solution for audio editing, podcast creation, mastering and audio restoration on both Mac and PC. The application is available in a Premium Edition and a lower cost Standard Edition. Both include a powerful and sample accurate clip editor that lets you navigate and edit single track audio with pristine quality. You can also create multitrack sessions where you can import or record audio clips to separate tracks that you can mix and process.

The Right Tool For Mastering?

What constitutes a fully fledged mastering DAW will mean different things to different people, however any new contender must sport at least some of the features common to all of the more established solutions.

It is still common for mastering engineers to use their favourite hardware in achieving their and their client’s vision. Audio plugins are no longer viewed as hardware’s poor relation, even in critical listening scenarios where quality control is the top priority. A new tool such as Acoustica must offer competent artistic control as well as the chops to carry out more prosaic tasks such as restoration and cleanup - two things we find it to be more than capable of. However the best tool for any mastering job is still the right pair of ears…