> I assume someone joined the invidual tracks manually in their digital audio workstation (DAW) software and botched the thing at that point. And I can safely a

> I assume someone joined the invidual tracks manually in their digital audio workstation (DAW) software and botched the thing at that point. And I can safely assume that person didn’t even to bother to listen it (it is over 50 minutes long so…). Nor did anyone else working there with that release. > I get that people make mistakes. That is natural. But WaterTower Music should have some sort of QA team in the building to prevent something like that from happening. Former audio mastering engineer here. Audio QA is hard. You need very high attention to detail to work in a mastering role. Many customers do not have serious QA skills and even if you get everything "right", if they miscommunicated their instructions and you faithfully fulfilled them, unfortunate things can happen. I once had a guy screaming at me over his assistant's phone (because he'd thrown his own through the window) "I JUST THREW AWAY A HUNDRED... THOUSAND... DOLLARS!" It was their fault, though. 300,000 CDs had to be destroyed. We got paid to make a new master, with rush fees. Not how I like to make my money, but the people who mattered were thrilled with the service we provided and our ability to turn around perfectly executed masters repeatedly under intense time pressure. With regards to the Batman Begins error, if I was the mastering engineer AND the one who did the edit, I would definitely have caught that. I listened all the way through to at least one copy of every master I ever prepared — you couldn't decline that service. That's not uncommon for mastering houses, and so I speculate that the error happened earlier in the chain, with a DAW operator who could have been an engineer or perhaps an artist with DAW skills. Somebody was tired and overbudget and couldn't muster the energy to listen to the damn thing for the ten thousandth time. Regrettably, although it seems clear that the overlap is not what the artist intended, it would get by most listeners — it's not like it's some nasty digital glitch, the overall mood and flow isn't killed dead. At the mastering stage, there's not a guarantee that somebody would point it out, even though we'd really like to have done so and earned the gratitude of the customer. Between the mastering preparation stage and the publishing stage, probably only someone highly familiar with the piece would have picked that error out, and sometimes those people don't bring their A game for QA.