As the home recording 'revolution' continues, we are seeing more and more people charging for professional audio services but who apparently have no idea about standards that have to be met in order to assure the best audio quality, and what to give their clients so they can proceed to post-production, mastering and manufacturing. There is a disturbing trend, especially in the hip-hop community, of studios, producers and so-called mastering engineers delivering mp3s as masters.
PLEASE MAKE NOTE - MP3 IS BARELY ACCEPTABLE AS A CONSUMER FORMAT. IT IS NOT ACCEPTABLE AS A MIX MASTER, PRODUCTION MASTER OR FOR ANY OTHER PROFESSIONAL APPLICATION!
The only thing in professional production that mp3 is used for is as a quick reference that can be uploaded for a client to approve a mix, an edit or a revision etc. Also, most stadium and arena music comes from mp3, but that is hardly a critical listening environment.
If you mix to a digital recording system, when you leave the studio you should have your mixes in as high resolution digital format as possible. Refer to our blog entry of Sept. 15, 2009 "Audio File Formats, Sample Rates and Bit Depth" for a detailed explanation. But in brief, your mixes should be .wav, .aif or .sd2 audio files of at least 24 bit resolution and at the same sample rate your session was tracked at. In other words no sample rate conversion should have been performed. Also, be sure you get your 1st generation, unprocessed mixes. That means no normalizing, fades, edits or any other process has been applied. You might also have a folder of Edit Masters which have fades & edits (normalizing shouldn't be done in any case), but for mastering you want the totally unaffected mix masters.
It's a good idea for you to take a hard drive to the studio and have them put your high res audio files there, or the studio may have priced a drive in your package, but you should also have them create one or more data CD-Rs or DVDs containing your mixes. I've seen it before; artists who think they've done the right thing by storing all of their mixes and sessions on a hard drive, only to have the drive fail. Having them on a hard medium like CD-R or DVD is the safest backup. Of course you also want the studio to provide you with an audio CD-R reference disc so you can easily proof your mixes, but for your archive and for mastering, post production etc. they should be high resolution .aif or .wav or .sd2 audio files.
