How to export a pre-master, and five mistakes that cost you a good one
A pre-master is just your finished mix, bounced as a stereo file, with nothing done to it that mastering is supposed to do. Simple — but a surprising share of disappointing masters are decided before the mastering starts.
The settings
- Format: WAV or AIFF. Never MP3. Once a file has been through lossy encoding, the damage is baked in and mastering will make it more audible, not less.
- Sample rate: whatever your project runs at. If you produced at 44.1 kHz, export at 44.1 kHz. Upsampling on the way out adds nothing.
- Bit depth: 24-bit, or 32-bit float if your DAW offers it. Not 16-bit — that conversion belongs at the very end of the chain, not the start.
- Dithering: off. You dither when you reduce bit depth for delivery, not when you hand a file to the next stage.
Mistake 1: no headroom
Bouncing a mix that peaks at 0 dBFS leaves nothing to work with, and if it clipped on the way out, that is now permanent. Aim for peaks somewhere around –6 to –3 dBFS.
The exact figure is not sacred — anything with a bit of room is fine. What matters is that the file is not already at the ceiling.
Mistake 2: leaving the limiter on the master bus
Most people put a limiter on the master bus while mixing so the track sounds finished. Then they export with it still engaged, and mastering gets a mix that has already been squashed.
Take it off, or back it off until it is barely working. If the mix falls apart without the limiter, that is worth knowing — it is a mix problem, and no mastering will fix it.
Mistake 3: cutting the tails
Set the export range so the last reverb and delay tails ring out completely. A bounce that stops at the last bar chops the decay, and there is no way to restore it afterwards.
Leave a little silence at the top too. It costs nothing and gives whoever masters it somewhere to work.
Mistake 4: not checking mono
Club systems are not reliably stereo where you are standing, and phone speakers definitely are not. Sum your mix to mono before you export and listen for anything that disappears — usually a wide synth or an over-processed bass.
If the low end vanishes in mono, fix it in the mix. Mastering can only make that problem louder.
Mistake 5: comparing against a reference at the wrong volume
Loud sounds better. That is not an opinion, it is how hearing works, and it is why comparing your mix against a mastered commercial track at matched playback volume is the only comparison that tells you anything.
If you A/B against a finished record without level-matching, you will chase loudness rather than balance — and end up with the squashed pre-master from mistake two.
What a clean bounce looks like
Check the file, not your memory of the session. Open the exported bounce fresh and confirm the format, the headroom, whether anything clipped, and that the tails are intact.
Sanity-check a bounce
The tool runs exactly that check on upload, before it processes anything. Useful even if you master somewhere else.
Check a bounce →
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