Anderton

trnfoot
I am glad you chimed in with that BlixYZ. Short of running out of processing power, why do people bounce to stereo before mastering in Sonar? Surely it makes more sense to use something like Ozone on the Master bus and keep the flexibility of being able to change anything in the mix. Is there an advantage of bouncing to stereo, or is that just a habit we have inherited from analogue days?

Excellent question. If you want to do more "global" operations, like add a fade out, cut out some measures, repeat something toward the beginning at the end, time-stretch or pitch-stretch, it's easier to do with a stereo file.
 
However, one tip I give to people who like "slammed" masters is to mix with a limiter in the master bus, but remove it before bouncing to stereo and sending me the two-track to master. That way they mix with slamming in mind.

There are a few reasons for me to do mastering separately. Setting the start point and fade and comparing the song to others in the set are a few reasons. I find it to be a totally different mindset. When I'm in multitrack, I'm thinking about about parts, arrangement, creative things. Mastering is more technical or analytical. My Mastering project will have several instances of the song, commercial reference songs (at least three), the other songs that will be in the set. So there are a bunch of tracks in my Mastering project even though I'm only concerned about one. But, here is the biggest reason. Let's say you record something really special. You may want a real Mastering Pro to master for you so you want to deliver a great mix minus all of the eq'ing, compression, stereo widening, etc. When you put let's say, Ozone 5 on your mastering bus, you will compensate for the things it is doing to your mix by adjusting individual tracks. You don't want that. You can't now turn off Ozone and now say the song is unmastered because you already made compensating track moves. You don't know what magic the Mastering person will do so give him/her the best, uncompressed, perfectly mixed song (that might be -24db RMS).

jmasno5Yes, I know that Mastering should be left to people that do it for a living but I'm just having fun. 

But then, where do little mastering engineers come from?

Thanks for all the suggestions on a mastering workflow, this is how I do things now.
As I said, it just seems I have to click and type slightly too much for what could, with some goodwill from the bakers, be a one step process. I wasn't saying I can't currently master effectively, I was saying it'd be nice if I could click a "mastering" button and automate the setting up.

Well I, for one, totally misunderstood what you originally meant. My apologies, Mr. Expander.