album-masteringlisted

# album-mastering — stereo mixes → distribution-ready release Turns a folder of finished stereo mixes into a complete, documented release: mastered WAVs, tagged lossless + reference copies, artwork, distributor metadata, and reports that disclose every process applied. **This is mastering, not mixing.** You get two-track masters, not stems. You cannot rebalance a vocal or move a kick. When something cannot be fixed safely at the master stage, **report it — never fake the fix with extreme EQ.** ## Hard rules 1. **Protect the originals.** Copy → `chmod 444` → verify SHA-256 → only then process. Never write to the source files. `prepare.py` enforces this and aborts on mismatch. 2. **Never invent identifiers.** ISRC, UPC, EAN, IPI/CAE, publisher IDs stay empty unless supplied. The distributor assigns them. 3. **Strip vendor metadata; never destroy the audit.** Export-tool junk (encoder strings, temp titles, local paths, generator names and IDs) is removed from everything shipped — `declare_provenance` defaults to `false`. The raw source tags stay verbatim in `metadata_before.json`, which is internal and never distributed, so provenance remains traceable. Two things this does **not** do: it does not rewrite the audit record, and it does not answer the distributor's AI-content question — a human does that at upload. 4. **Never notch a harmonic series.** Peak detectors flag musical content. Test before treating (the pipeline does this automatically and