@Pat McDonald 503689 wrote:

Just so long as you save the project between “experiments”, I’d go along with that. It is not a very nice feeling to take somebody elses work and turn it into garbage irreversibly.

It doesn’t really work like that with modern day DAW’s, especialy If you are using software effects (as most people would be doing if they were mastering their own songs in their bedrooms).

It’s literally a matter of putting an effect/compressor/limiter etc. on the song, and then taking it off again if your experiments don’t yield a good result. The processing’s done “live” on the playback rather then hard-coded into the original sound file whilst you are working on it. You only set it in stone to .wav at the end, and even this can be changed as you only need to open up your project again in your daw and tweak/remove one of the things that wasn’t quite right then re-record.

Unless ofc you don’t have all you need in one DAW, then it’s a slightly different story as you’ll be bouncing down to .wav with some effects on and then applying more in another program, but you don’t really need to do this much with the amount of stuff you get as standard with DAW’s nowadays, and with the possibility of endless 3rd party plugins to use within your DAW there really is no need. Unless there’s something very specific I want to do that only one program can do I’ve never had to bounce down to .wav in the mastering process other then the final product (with the exception of dithering, what I use a different program for, but this is ALLWAYS the very last step).

You do however need to keep saving as you go along as much as possable encase of any crashes to avoid loosing work you’ve done.

In most proper mastering house’s things work differently ofc, and they would be using mainly hardware, so possibly would need to record in stages depending on how much and what processing was needed. There are some pure software mastering houses out there though I’ve heard.