Can Garageband files be professionally mastered?

[Jeremy Blair]

My band is getting ready to home record an album and we'd like to keep the option open for professional mastering if we record something nice.

We are gearing up to use Garageband as the recording software and I am reading that GB does not export in .wav. Will this be a problem for a professional mastering studio?

I've always heard that .wav is needed for mastering. Is this true?

Here is our gear;

ART Tube MP pre-amps for each mic
Yamaha MG102c 4 channel analog mixer
M-Audio MobilePre USB Interface
+ the afore mentioned Garageband app

Thanks.

[fortyseven]

WAV is to audio what AVI is to video. Its the preferred and dare I say default format for audio. It is a lossless format which basically means it offers a higher quality than something like mp3 which is a lossy format and actually is not an audio format at all.
Im curious as to what format GB can render to?

[richiebee]

If GB exports AIF then you should be okay.

AIF is kind of the Mac equivalent of WAV.

[Jeremy Blair]

Ahh, good stuff. I searched around on AIF and found this:

"You can export as an AIFF file to iTunes, where you freely convert between four formats: AAC and MP3 (compressed, small file sizes) and
AIFF and WAV (uncompressed, large files)"

So I get it now, thanks big for the hand.