Merc Zach

Rather than sending the mastering engineer all of your tracks you could send him/her stems. The mastering engineer finishes, and masters, the rest of the song. You should check with the enginner before assuming the mastering engineer will do this.

What's your budget? If you let us know I think users will be able to suggest places to go. FYI, mastering rates vary just like studio rates, where you can get rooms for $25 an hour including an engineer to $2000 a day with no engineer. Also do you want to be part of the master process, like physically sitting in the studio? Or are you find sending it off to be mastered?

But with computers becoming more and more powerful do you need a separate card to do all of the audio processing? Or can the computers CPU (especially with these quad core cpu's) now handle everything? This is where things become interesting... I have seen some pretty huge sessions (Logic) run without a glitch on the new quad Macs.

After working in LA I can say that people occasionally use a specific DAW because of the features. The decision to use specific software is in fact not opinion based. For each person the features you need will be specific to what you are doing. So there really isn't a perfect or "best" DAW. In fact, for some people PT's may be the best solution. For example, in LA people expect to be able to bring a PT's session and open everything up. So in that respect PT's is the only DAW that's going to work.