its totally awesome to have the skills, knowledge and tools to do mastering at home but i just recently did a track for someone and took it to a studio for mastering.. the only reason i suggest this is because if you have a mix of your tracks done from home and you dont really want to add/change anything major you will really only be in the studio for like 1-2 hours TOPS which you can prob find someone for 10-20 dollars an hour. its also cool because the studio will have different and possibly better gear than you do and it will make your songs sound different and unique - esp if they have outboard compressors and such mastering tools

im all about DIY but dont overlook going into a studio just for mastering

It's all semantics, but mastering is different than just boosting the volume of your tracks so they don't sound anemic next to commercially released stuff.
A true mastering house will also text encode your CD and add very specific track marker IDs, and 9 times out of 10 will sound way better than any jobber you could do at home.
Me and my boy who taught me how to 'home master' using plugins jokingly call it "smashing". It helps to have some decent monitors- especially for beats, at least 8" woofers.
You can smash the life out of your tracks with gratuitous use of those plugins- dynamic range needs to be kept- I've heard some street mix CDs that were smashed so loud they were barely listenable.

yeah for sure, going to get your shit professionally mastered is the way to go...you can do a lot at home, mastering isn't/shouldn't be one of those things...


that being said, if you can't afford it, are ghetto like me, throwing a limiter on that shit with various other plugs and listening critically is all you can do

Try throwing an EQ on there & cut the low lows (under 30) a little bit- THEN raise the low around 160ish- sometimes it works great, cutting some inaudible muck & tightening up whatever bass is there, then hit the limiter & burn.

TRUE...