Mastering is the final step of organised audio production. The goal of mastering is to maximize play ability on all platforms and media types while harmonizing the auditory components of a stereo mix. Traditionally, tools like stereo enhancement, limiting, compression, and equalization are used for mastering. The future of mastering may be in a shambles, as tools like Ozone 9 AI mastering engineer take the stage. With use of this, it completely disposes of the role of the mastering engineer, saving songwriters and producers a significant amount of time, and potentially money. You can even put in a reference track so that the AI will master it almost exactly the same, which is good for multi- genre producers. Although the AI mastering engineer does not always create a perfect result, and highly experienced engineers will out perform it most of the time, I am sure that as time passes, the quality of the AI’s results will improve, as too will the quality of lower budget production music. This knowledge of mastering will impact my future work, as I now know that if times get tough, and I seriously cannot be bothered to finish off a track by mastering it, and being forced to listen to it over and over again more than I already have, I can just pay a small amount of money for Ozone 9, much smaller than what i would have to pay a master assistant, and have an AI do it all for me. Perhaps I could tweak it slightly myself, but it is always good to have a solid basis of a master that could potentially work.