Finished recording my tracks..now what?

I've finished recording songs for my cd...I've played with the mix placement and have all my levels where I am likng them. What now?

I've been reading on mastering and am quite frankly a little confused...I can't afford to send it off to have it done and I've got some good info from the tech forum here on the subject, still confused.

When I burn the tunes to a cd and listen to them in the 'real' world - the bass is a little more boomy than I want - would this be taken care of by
a)working on the individual track in MC, causing me to possibly have to re-mix?
b)apply changes to the whole song in WAV format using MC or some other program?

I'm a little confused and would like some input - I want the final product to sound as good as possible naturally - and I know it can be tweaked a little more to pull the best out.

FYI - I record all of my tracks dry right around -3dB to 0dB and apply effects after to the desired sections in a seperate track. Just in case that may be useful somehow. I also monitor everything with cans as I live in an apartment building and have a wife, so I'm doing this then taking it out to the world to test my adjustments.

Any tips/advice/procedures you use would be appreciated.
Thanks in advance!

ok, I see - am setting up an overall parametric EQ and putting it in AUX 1 - then applying where I think it needs to go and to what degree (make sense?), using reverb on 2 .... I can hear the difference, I'll play with it. I would like to apply a bit of compression to the whole project - however don't see a compressor in my cakewalk rack - do I need a plug in?

I would like to do as much as possible in MC.

The only track to have compression is my bass line - then added a small amount of distortion to the track as well. It sits around -12dB to -6dB max. These effects are appplied to the whole track and are not in my tray to switch on and off - so I have some bass tracks now that are at this point - permenantly effected. Bass sits at 5 to the right.

I'm pretty sparse with other effects -
drums: clean- panned slightly to the left at 5

guitars: clean, although a few tracks will have flange or chorus enabled in my tray. They will sit hard at 30 - 40 for panning depending on the harmonies going on and overall sound.
I double all of my rythym tracks and seperate them hard for a good overall sound - I don't just copy track a into track b and call it another guitar part.

My primary goal when laying down any new track is to get the cleanest recording possible without any effects at the time. My mixdown always has the main level bouncing in the red between -3dB and 0dB - should I be keeping it out of the red as much as possible? If I see it pegging the upper limits of 0dB, then I drop the whole track level. Coming from an old tape based multitrack (experience) - I always wanted it to be a little 'hot' for the mixdown, should I be approaching it differently for digital?

Thanks, I've got the Blueline plugins and played around a little last night, I've got to tweak my settings - but it will work out good. I think I do need to apply some compression to a couple individual tracks though.

I'm looking at the Sound Forge - but xmas + bass set up i just bought = broke me. I think it would be a good purchase. Thanks again for the tips and pointing me in the right direction, appreciate it.

Jsut a guess:

Export the file from MC that you want to work on as a .wav. Open the .wav in Sound Forge and edit, save as a .wav. Import it into MC.

There is a link under tools to Sound forge in my program, but it does not work, now in the Sonar demo it works flawlessly, sound forge opens but it does not automatically send the audio file to it from what i can detiremine.

What are you trying to do? maybe we can suggest a good workaround..