Someone told me it’s like updating a songs firmware but this confused me even further
In: Engineering
Ever photocopy a photocopy? And then have you photocopied that photocopy again? Notice how the quality goes down each time? The same is true with any kind of recording.
The “master” is the original studio recording clips for a song. Every time they’re read from, that read will never be as high quality as the actual recording. That master copy is very rarely read from, since you always have the risk of damaging it each time you access it. Instead, there will be a version of the song created from it, and then that copy will be used to make more copies for eventually creating CDs/records/etc.
When a song is remastered, they go back to those original recording clips. This can either be just re-copying them with higher quality on that initial read, or they could be piecing the song together again, possibly from other takes of certain sections, or with slightly different timings on the transitions.
People pretend to change the overall mix of instruments in songs to evade copyright payments
Mastering a song is checking, and often correcting, how a song sounds so that it’s not too quiet, not too loud, and works well with the media (CDs, FLACs, Vinyl, etc.) that it’s on. For instance, a recording on Vinyl needs to be carefully equalized to let the bass come through, but if it’s too loud, it can cause the player to skip!
The mastering engineer also will make sure all the tracks on an album are at roughly the same loudness, and that the song order works well.
Remastering is that same thing, but usually done to take advantage of technology that has come out since the album’s first release. For instance, when CDs first came out, they had to remaster a lot of albums because CDs could reproduce high end tones at a higher volume than vinyl did.
Songs are frequently recorded in individual tracks for each instrument and/or singer. When all those tracks are assembled, balanced for volume, etc., and combined into a single recording – that’s the master.
Re-mastering is going through the process again. Digitally remastering is taking those original analog recordings from before when digital recording was common, converting them to digital, and then mastering them.
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