Usually a master will be ready in 1-3 days. It mostly depends on the time of receiving the files, I do critical listening sessions at the start of my day (EU time zone).
Main delivery: if the source files were produced at a higher sample rate (48-96 kHz), I will master at that native sample rate, and deliver 16-bit and 24-bit stereo wave files at the same native sample rate.
Additional delivery: stereo wave file standard 16-bit 44.1 kHz. This format is compatible with absolute all digital stores and playback devices, and still widely used.
Delivery on request: lossless FLAC and lossy AAC/MP3 conversion.
Everything above is included in the price per song. There is no limit regarding the number of revisions, I’m a reasonable person and I want your music to sound as close to your vision as possible.
A safe service that allows to just drag & drop files up to 50 GB (and with one month auto-expiration) is SwissTransfer.com. Otherwise, any other cloud storage solution works.
I’ll prefer a file naming scheme like Artist Name - Track Title (BPM, bit depth, sample rate).
For each song I will need two versions: the mix and the self-made pre-master as reference. If you completely trust my taste, sending just the mix and specifying a known reference song is fine.
The files ****should be exported as 32-bit floating point wave files. Do not worry about the actual level of the tracks, don’t change anything for the purpose of the export. The floating point format is ensuring that no clipping will ever occur. Just disable the relevant plugins (see below).
If you export from Ableton Live or other DAWs that have no pre-roll at Bar 1.1.1.1, please shift your entire project 4 bars to the right (drag everything, or use the insert time feature if available), and export with a bit of blank space before the song starts.
The reason is that sometimes these DAWs can cut out few samples of the audio right at the beginning of the song. Also make sure you leave plenty of tail at the end of the song, so I can fade out the tails smoothly.