Why master with exported tracks in ableton

[spip72]

Hi all,

It seems from many posts, that a lot of you export the individual tracks in ableton for mastering purposes. What's the reasoning behind that? In understand the need if you want to master in a different DAW, or if someone else is going to do the mastering for you. But in my case, I do the mastering in ableton on my own. Is there any reason why I cant or shouldn't do the mastering on the master track directly in the project?

Thanks!
Jakob

[Richie Witch]

The reason I do it is to have enough CPU cycles. If I've got all sorts of fancy soft synths, bus compressors, and FX, I'm already up to 35-45% CPU usage. By bouncing all the tracks to audio, CPU usage drops to below 5% and now I have all the power I need to stack up those CPU-intensive mastering plugins.

[Tarekith]

There's no right or wrong way to do it, it's all personal preference. Some people want to save the CPU cycles, other people like having a clean palette where they aren't tempted to retweak the mixdown. Still others like having all their song aspects stored in one project file. Really up to you and the way you like to work, there's no technical reason why one method is better than the other.

[spip72]

Thanks for the clarifications! I was wondering if I could improve audio quality by doing the export tracks thing. I also have issues with CPU overload sometimes, but I'm not sure if thats an issue in the final audio file export. I'm thinking that since Ableton doesn't have to process the audio in real time, it can use as much CPU as needed. If there's no real gain in doing it, I think I prefer having everything in the project file.

[Tarekith]

Like you said, export isn't a realtime process so there's no need to worry about CPU during that part of the process.

[Stromkraft]

It seems from many posts, that a lot of you export the individual tracks in ableton for mastering purposes. What's the reasoning behind that? In understand the need if you want to master in a different DAW, or if someone else is going to do the mastering for you. But in my case, I do the mastering in ableton on my own. Is there any reason why I cant or shouldn't do the mastering on the master track directly in the project?

I do the final steps in Live, though I call it pseudo-mastering because I think master engineers are experienced individuals with 1000+ tracks experience and rooms I can't afford to build.

I export a stereo file — 24 or 32bit undithered —  from my "Main Buss", that sits before the master and that receives all audio from busses and tracks. This export I open in a specific master template set with tools suited for mastering and specific reference tracks. I do the Pseudo-mastering in this set in sessions dedicated just to that.

I send the same exported stereo file to a master engineer for releases. so my own pseudo-master doesn't affect that pipeline at all.

While I certainly think there are no right or wrong ways and that everyone should find out for themselves how they like to make music, I feel separate sessions for different aspects of making a new track is both efficient and gives better results than just rushing trough in the original set and moving between mixing and pseudo mastering in the same session (that I did before). That didn't work for me.

[AAdel]

It depends on the sound engineer you're submitting your project for mix and mastering.
Most of the the time he works on a different DAW.