A.I.

Preparing your tracks for mastering is crucial to achieving a professional, polished sound. In this guide, we cover the essential steps to ensure your music is ready for the mastering process, including tips on keeping your mix clean, exporting in the right format, organizing your files, and providing a reference track. Proper preparation not only enhances the final product but also streamlines the workflow with your mastering engineer. Follow these best practices to give your tracks the best chance to shine.

Control 24 Power Supply Repair

Repairing a power supply can seem daunting, but it's a valuable skill for any studio tech, especially for those working wi

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Nick Landis
Free Plugins

Who doesn't love free plugins?

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Nick Landis
It’s The Sound Baby!

Originally published in the October 2023 issue of Rock an

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John McNerney

The International Standard Musical Work Code, or ISWC, is a unique identifier for musical works. Like the ISRC is for recordings and the ISNI is for people, the ISWC helps identify and disambiguate musical works. Along with being a unique identifier, the ISWC is also permanent and an internationally recognized ISO reference number for the identification of musical works.

As formats change and the media they're recorded on ages, it becomes increasingly difficult to transfer the information off of those formats into new, more modern formats. That's basically what archival and restoration is: transferring recordings from one format to another. Usually, the transfer is from an older format on more fragile media to something newer and easier to work with.

YouTube announced this week they are implementing the ISNI standard for name disambiguation across their whole platform. The International Standard Name Identifier is an ISO-certified global standard number for uniquely identifying anyone who creates anything. Public names of a researcher, investor, writer, artist, actor, performer, publisher, etc... are unambiguously attributed by number globally in perpetuity regardless of field, medium, or type of art/creation.

International Standard Name Identifier is new metadata to resolve name ambiguity for contributors to creative works. This number can define a person, like a writer, artist, performer, producer, etc., or it can define an organization, like publishers, studios, aggregators, etc..

The newest metadata standard for music is here apparently and it is RIN-M. Soundways has a free plugin that gets saved in your DAW when you are creating the tracks and you can add everyone's information and send it along. It is a cool idea on solving the issue with how recording credits are stored and transferred. You can download the plugin here

Independant artists have difficulty getting into the Mastered For iTunes program, but if you wanted to try to deal directly with apple to get in here are the requirements directly from Apple. Even if you meet the requirements they may still referr you. On top of that, they also have payment thresholds and you may never get paid if you don't meet the threshold for your first payment. And now the requirements.

Technical Requirements:

Recently, I had a client that ran into some problems with the cover art for their project. It seems iTunes has some rather stringent (in my opinion) requirements for the cover art. Part of me understands that there needs to be some requirements or checks in place and I agree with Apple that people should not be 'misleading' in the representation of their music. But, I felt this particular case may have been a bit ridiculous.