How Do People Master Albums?

[Lydian]

It's to my understanding that the volume level of all the tracks should sound cohesive flowing together is it not? In that case... is mastering done in one project session containing all the mixes?

For example if there was 10 tracks on an album.

Would the artist import those 10 tracks into one project file and process them differently  side to side that way they flow together nicely during transitions?

[Hymoki]

If you're doing in the box mastering, with say Ozone for example, you'd probably import the whole album into an instance of Ozone as well as one or two reference tracks you or your client really like and think are a good sonic match to the tracks being mastered. Then you find what you think is the best overall mix in the album already, something that represents the album's style more than anything else, and master that one first. When that first track is done, it becomes much easier to master to a similar sonic character as the first one and make all the pre-masters sound like one cohesive piece. I'm no mastering engineer, but at school this was how I learned lots of people do it.

[Mussar]

Think about what mastering is, and about how mastering originally worked. You would bring all of your master tapes down to the mastering house, where they would print those songs onto a giant glass disc that became the master press for every vinyl that was going to sold of that album. If the songs changed wildly in level from song to song, it would sound like a bunch of unrelated material and wouldn't be great.

To fix that, the mastering engineer would level balance all the songs to each other and not just to commercial loudness.

[Marrow Machines]

there's plenty of mastering plugins to try.

and different mastering plugins for different purposes
reason why i chose a mximizer over limiter (aside from the price stand point) was what a maximizer does to the song to increase the loudness and how it effects the transients of the percussion in the master.

I chose something with RMS style compression, because i wanted more control of my compression than just having a peak compressor.

Different people also translate to different sounds.

If you wanna buy some mastering plugins, don't just go for ozone; but choose ozone for reasons.

[attila]

I would advise against using the whole ozone mastering plugin and instead use the individual izotope plugs as you need them. I found when I had them all there I had bad self control and used way more than I needed to.

Mastering is a hugely different skillset though...

But when I did my last EP i brought all the tracks into one session and went back and forth, listened to the frequency bands and adjusted multibands as needed. It's become more and more subtle with every release.