Ok, so me and a friend of mine have recorded a few bands with his mixing board connected to my laptop using Audacity. We've got a few good sounds thru it, and the bands are happy with it. But I was wondering, how should I go about trying to really master the music? I mean, fruity loops is ok, but when I load the music into it, it breaks the song down into ~800 samples, all garbled up. So, what do you recommended as a mastering program that is (somewhat) easy to understand and use, but still offers alot? Freeware is also nice, everything I've tried has only came in demos

you mean mixing?

Get 'Reaper'. i think its up to 2.4.
(from the dude that made Winamp)

It's actually better than alot of programs that cost a reasonable amount (in a casual market sense).

I use Pro Tools all the time (work and home) and regard Reaper very high in the pecking order (in front of Audacity, Cubase, Audition etc).

Whats more its dirt cheap for honest people
...
Free for everyone else;)

Thanks. I'll check into that.

But I think I'm looking for mastering, not mixing. I need something that'll let me really tweak with sounds and stuff. Fruity Loops would let me do that, if it didn't chop the finished song up into hundreds of samples. It'd be cool to be able to put an effect over a section of a track, and etc. I'll def check out reaper though.

Most mastering suites use banks of outboard gear to 'master'.

Assuming that you don't want to spend a heap of cash, most programs will let you put effects over tracks, though it won't sound as good as hardware that is designed specifically for that purpose.

Reaper does have a large plugin library, though you should be able to get plugins for Audacity to do the same.

Well, as far as I know, Audacity is pretty bare bones. Nothing really to intense with it. But that's just as far as I know. So far I'm liking Reaper, and I'm going to use it next time I record, just to see how much you can tweak with stuff

Google should show some results for plug-ins you can download and use. For Audacity that is.

REAPER is what I use, but that's just preference.

REAPER is what I use as well.
Amazing program!

For all the people reccomending Reaper, would you highly reccomend it over Audacity? I do a little bit of recording with my TonePort and currently use Audacity, but if Reaper is better I might have to check it out.

It's personal preference really, if you like and are good at using Audacity, I'd suggest you stay with that, because it will cut your production times. REAPER does have more functionality, but you'd have to give it a try to see if you like it.

I'll give it a looking at. My recordings are pretty basic, 1 guitar, 1 bass and 2 vocal tracks recorded with a drum beat made in Reason, so I guess I don't really need alot of features as such since I'm only doing simple metal songs and shit. But as I said, I'll have a look into it.

Torrent Adobe Audition 1.5

I use Cool Edit Pro 2 at home and Adobe Audition at school.