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Originally Posted by Leon
Well it's actually really easy and cheap you know:
EARPHONES! 
I only have software to produce music, so I stick the earphones (note: not HEADphones) in my computer and you immediately pick up too much bass or cracks or whatever it is that's making your song sound ugly.
My god, never thought I'd ever be ''advising'' people things about music production  |
not to rain on your parade leon
but headphones, let alone earphones are NOT suitable or accurate for mastering or mixing purposes. Unless you have perhaps specialised (read: rather expensive) headphones you'll always want to mix and master on decent speakers. I'd say it's pretty obvious tiny earphones don't tell you anything about too much bass, since these things do not produce any (real) bass at all.
Of course we all have to get by with what we can afford. I only recently got a pair of monitor's and their pretty much the cheapest around, but they are already definitely a step up from my old hifi speakers. Also, even if you have quite crappy speakers you can still mix on them if you know what their weaknesses are so you can compensate.
As for mastering itself, mostly you'd want to let the real mastering be done by something who know's what he's doing, and has the gear to do it. Again, for most of us hobbyists this simply isn't practical (or affordable) so again we have to make do with the stuff we have. A bit of compression, a bit of eq and that's about as far as mastering goes under these circumstances. There are a lot of mastering plugins that can either make your track sound great, or make it sound like crap if you don't know what you're doing. If you have a good mix you won't have to do much mastering, or you could even ruin it by applying too much compression for example. A good mastering engineer can make a good mix sound even better, but he can't make a crap mix sound good.