Who actually edits the agreed-upon radio version?

[EmbraceRandom]

I'm not coming at this combatively in any way and I'm happy to do whatever work falls within my remit. I'm just curious to know the typical industry approach to this.

I've produced, recorded and rough-mixed a track for an artist. The artist's team need a radio edit as well as the main version so I duplicated by DAW project and did the edit, which the artist's team have green-lit. It's a typical radio edit; a bunch of stuff has been hacked out but the transitions have been edited to be smooth and musical, on an instrument-by-instrument basis.

The track is being properly mixed by a third party, whom I've worked with before. Once we're happy with the mix, the mixer normally just sends me the stereo WAV.

So who actually edits the agreed-upon radio version of the final mix? I see 4 options:

I just send stems of the main version to the mixer, for them to mix and ultimately send me the stereo WAV, but then I can't do the radio edit as it requires more control than what can be achieved with just a single stereo file.

The mixer sends me their final mix stems for me to edit, but then any dynamics or harmonic processing he has on his master bus would either be bypassed OR, if he prints the stems via the master bus, I don't think the master bus processing would be working in the same way as it does for the stereo WAV we've signed off, as it wouldn't be getting hit with the full mix. Unless all of his master bus plugins can take a sidechain and he can be bothered to set all of that up... no?

I send the mixer stems for both the main version and radio edit of the track, he mixes the main version until we've signed that off, then he duplicates his DAW project, drops in the radio edit stems onto new channels and copies/moves his automation around accordingly. Then he sends me two stereo WAVS (main and radio).

Some other approach that I don't know!

What's the industry standard?

[Hugh Robjohns]

The few radio edits I've done have just been on the stereo mix master.

If your edits are more complicated and require multitrack editing then I think you have no choice but to send two separate multitrack files to the mix engineer — the full version and the radio edit version.

Its possible they'd want to mix /process the radio version slightly differently anyway.

[EmbraceRandom]

Thanks Hugh, appreciate your input.

[James Perrett]

With the older stuff from the days of tape it was normal to use the same multitrack but possibly do a different mix for radio and edit that mix as needed. It was actually more common for the radio mix to be a straight mix from the multitrack and the extended 12" mix to be created by making different mixes from the multitrack and editing them together.

How creative is the mixer expected to be? Would they be adding any musical parts or are they just mixing what is there? I think this is possibly something that needs to be discussed between you as there are all kinds of ways to approach this.

[Tomás Mulcahy]

This was an interesting interview about radio edits, but it is from 25 years ago! The company is still active in "branding" for radio.

I have been doing radio edits for a friend recently. All but one were do-able with the stereo mix. But it is useful to know the tempo so you can easily edit on the beat in a DAW.

[EmbraceRandom]

The mixer wouldn't be adding any musical parts at all, just the technical task of mixing. Given editing a stereo WAV wouldn't work for this track, I was wondering if it was a fair request for them to mix the main version and then import the radio edit stems onto the respective channels and copy the relevant automation over. All with the aim of me being best informed before I spoke to the mixer about it.

[James Perrett]

All with the aim of me being best informed before I spoke to the mixer about it.

In this case it very much sounds like a discussion is needed.