Decoder Mastering

Release ready tracks at a friendly rate

Welcome and thanks for your interest in our mastering services. Decoder Mastering was founded to make your music sound as good as it possibly can, against very reasonable pricing. Check the services and pricing or get in touch here for more information or if you want to have your music mastered.

About

Decoder Mastering offers music mastering services from the North of The Netherlands. For mastering a hybrid approach is used, guaranteeing the benefits and sound of an analog chain together with the best digital plugins for surgical operations. The studio has been designed and built by a professional architectural and electro-acoustic designer. It is acoustically balanced to ensure the studio monitors are "telling the truth", something that is often a problem in typical home production studios.

Besides the proper environment and hardware, a fresh and objective ear is a great benefit of using a mastering engineer opposed to mastering your music yourself. You probably listened to your tracks to death and your ears are biased by a certain sound. Decoder Mastering checks your music, and can advise about your mix before giving it that final touch it might need.

Services and Pricing

Mastering

Below are the per track rates for mastering. Every mastered track is delivered to you as a 16bit 44.1KHz .wav file. Included is a backup of your masters for a year. Recovery of backups is possible at a charge of € 10 per recovery action, so take care of your masters.

All prices are excluding 21% VAT and may be subject to change.

Tracks	Price
1 track	€ 30
2 tracks	€ 60
3 tracks	€ 90
4 tracks	€ 120
5 tracks	€ 145
6 tracks	€ 170
7 tracks	€ 195
8 tracks	€ 220
More than 8 tracks	Get in touch for a quote.

Revisions

It usually doesn't happen, but if you're not happy with the sound and want a revision, that's free of charge. If you'd like to deliver a revised mix after a track has already been mastered, € 15 is charged if the mix can be mastered with the same settings. If the mix differs too much, the per track rate is charged.

Extras

• Delivery of a DDP file (for CD replication) plus a player: € 25.

For everything else that is not mentioned here, just drop a message for a quote for what you need.

Turnaround time

This can vary between a day or a week, depending on the workload.

Payment

Paypal is the most convenient, but bank transfer is also possible of course. Payment is only requested when you heard something you're satisfied with.

Preparation

Before sending your tracks, here are some guidelines to prevent delays later on in the process:

• Listen to your tracks from start to end, to ensure everything sounds as it should.
• Do not use limiters or compressors on your master bus.
• Send the tracks at a level below 0dB (like -3dB or -6dB), so no digital clipping occurs.
• Send the tracks in Wave format (preferably 32bit float, but 16bit also works). No compressed formats like MP3.

Delivering your tracks

Services like WeTransfer or Dropbox are recommended and easy to use, but other file senders will probably also work just fine.