what’s the difference between mastering an audio and mixing it? and which one comes first?

Question

what’s the difference between mastering an audio and mixing it? and which one comes first?

In: Other

Answer 1

You mix it first. This means taking all the individual tracks (guitars, piano, drums, bass, vocals, whatever individual performances that make up the song) and make them fit together.

Once that’s done, you downmix all this to a stereo rendition – i.e. all the tracks blended into a single stereo file.

Then you send this to a mastering engineer. The mastering engineer makes sure the audio is within loudness targets and other specs for the delivery medium, and does light processing to compensate for any defects the mixing engineer might have missed.