Did you ever A/B your master against another song ? other song should sound messy too on your WMP.
Just cut everything (soundgoodizers, eq, ...) on your player to get a good idea.
Export your stems and master to 24 bits. it's usually enough.
Yeah with mp3/CD, it'll switch to 16bits, but your plugins will like to have a bit more ground to work.
Ableton , along all other serious DAW have 64 bit treatment (sound engine/summation , it's unrelated to 32/64 bits processors). No worry on that side

 

A few things:

1) Your master sounds different in Windoze Media Player, as opposed to however you're usually listening to it, for the same reason it will sound different in iTunes: they both have a built-in "Sound Enhancer" option that's usually defaulted to "On". Go into you Preferences window in Windoze Media Player and make sure the option is switched off, if you want it to sound consistent with how you got used to hearing it while you mixed. I advise keeping it on, however. If you can bounce a file to a 44.1 kHz/128 kbps .mp3, load it into Windoze Media Player or iTunes with the Sound Enhancer on and it still sounds solid, you're listening to it in much the same way most of the people who will wind up listening to it these days will be hearing it. And always A/B roll it in your media player with a commercial track that's fairly close to the sound you're trying to get.

2) About that commercial track. Always have a high-resolution (preferably a .wav file ripped directly from a CD, not an .mp3) copy of this track handy to listen to in comparison to your mix. If you can trust this commercial track, then you can mix fairly confidently in comparison to it. It won't even matter if your monitors or 'phones are that great, you'll still be able to hear the basics of the solid track you know, and you can hear the essentials of that mix -- the panning, levels, amount of reverb and Q -- that you can follow.

3) Pull everything off your mastering chain. EVERYTHING. Especially EQs! Before you worry about further altering your mix with EQs, spatial processing or dynamics, you want to go back to your raw mix. Now, you can hear if your bass isn't bass-y enough, or if you don't have things panned properly, or if you're using too much reverb, or if your levels are off. These things should be fixed as much as possible before you stick anything on the mastering chain. You can still compare your raw mix to that commercial mix. Turn the commercial mix down so that both mixes are around the same level ... and now, you can figure out the problems your mix is having. If your guitars don't sound like the commercial mix's guitars, get online and do some research. Are they panned properly? Is there a specific EQ setting you might need to utilize to bump up the mid-range? Are they being compressed properly? A lot of the time, the mastering EQs and compressors are actually masking a lot of problems in the mix, by making them louder or pulling out other elements in weird ways. Once you're satisfied that your mix is a lot closer to the commercial mix's, the next thing you want to do is close the commercial mix and listen to your own mix. Does it now sound the way you want it to sound? Are you comfortable with it?

4) Now add the mastering plugs. This is what any mastering engineer would probably tell you: the less you have to do here, the better. Your mastering EQ should be minimal, maybe a hi-pass and a low-pass filter, maybe half a dB of bump in the upper mids, maybe a dB in the bass region, maybe a tiny percentage of scoop in the 180-300 Hz range to bump down some of the mud. Very minimal, just "sweetening". if you find yourself having to add a lot of EQ anywhere to make it sound "good", then you need to turn off the EQ and go back to the mix itself. Then, a compressor with a very transparent setting. All you really want to do here is bring up the soft parts a little, while reeling in the "full mix" when everything is active. if you turn on the compressor and there's a huge jump in volume, it's too much. Finally, you can try sticking on a limiter, like a Waves L2/L3/L3-LL or an Ozone 5 Maximizer module (what I use). Make sure the output is at around -.03 dB. Now, bring down the threshold until your mix sounds roughly as loud as the commercial mix's does at full volume. If it sounds weird, distorted or just plain bad, back off the threshold until it's where you're comfortable with it. You should now be "in the ballpark". But even after all that ...

5) Your mix will never sound like the commercial mix's. For that to happen, you'd have to use the same instruments, the same mics, the same expensive console and the same mixing and mastering engineers, not to mention, the vast fortune in outboard gear. Once you're finally in the ballpark, your goal is to make it sound as close as possible to the way you intended it to with what you have. In other words, your final product should sound good to you, with overall levels that can compete with commercial levels. Unfortunately, today's commercial levels are too much. Don't be afraid to pull back on the limiter threshold a bit, so that your levels are roughly around where they'd be in the mid-to-late Nineties (an average of -14 to -12 dB RMS is pretty healthy, while leaving plenty of room for your mix to breathe), especially since your song will be further compressed via the above-mentioned Sound Enhancer function in WMP or iTunes, or if it gets any sort of radio play. Hope this helped a little!

 

As I said in my earlier post 'What you describe is what the onboard Realtek drivers of my laptop do unless I switch off the Realtek EQ.'

My Realtek High Def drivers do the same thing if I use the EQ in the Realtek Audio Manager -- my tracks sound terrible in WMP.

Have faith that your masters are fine and the problem lies in the audio driver.

Spend some money on a basic soundcard with ASIO drivers and switch off IDT onboard audio completely.

 

I had a similar issue when going through and mastering.

It just so happened I wasn't using one of my VST mastering plug-ins properly. I had used a multiband compressor/expander in conjunction with other plugins focusing on EQ and what not. One of the VST I was using allowed me to specify which bands of frequencies that I wanted to expand/brighten and I though it applied to other settings in that VST (which was totally not the case). The resulting master turned out to be a totally compressed sounding mashed up piece of garbage. After figuring this out everything I have mastered sounds great! I did not notice however using my studio equipment that I had completely messed up the mastering until I put it to use on a LARGE amplified system. I would recommend going through your settings in your VSTS and see if perhaps there is something you have overlooked.

 

I downloaded wavelab 8 and used the same mastering setup that I used on my other applications, but put my mastering limiter before the maximizer and switched the limit function on the maximizer on and then off and listened to it with the MME driver, It added the compression when I enabled it but sounded fine when I disabled it. I then rendered the a file in Wavelab 8 with the limiting function on the maximizer off and played it back through windows media player, this gave me a very minimal but satisfactory amount of compression when needed.

 

If it sounds OK on one Media Player and not the other, and you are running both players through the same monitors, then it seems to me it has to be the settings on the Media Player itself.. Check the settings on the 1st one to make sure you are not running any automatic volume suppression programs, WOW effects, EQ, or any of that other crap that is built into Media Player. Sometimes those are set to do things you don't want. What does it sound like if you run it through something besides Media Player? What does it sound like converted to MP3 played through something else?

 

If I run it through VLC player or something similar, then there is absolutely no compression at all. If I run it through wavelab 8 on MME audio and add the mastering effects to a clean wav file that I rendered at -4db it still sounds over compressed with the settings I was using before, but I altered the effects chain order and removed an auto limiter setting in the maximizer and now it sounds passable.

 

If you wanna get even remotely serious about mastering :

YOU DON'T PUT TWO LIMITER AT THE END OF YOUR CHAIN.

before you ask : yes a maximizer IS a limiter.

 

My maximizer has a limiter on off switch on it, I also have a limiter plugin as well and I read some where that it was better to switch off the maximizer limiter (which has only auto setting) and use a seperate limiter plugin.

 

Something that adds to the feeling of your audio beeing overcompressed, is the fact that you rendered your file to 44.1khz/16bit before applying mastering effects.
Converting to a lower bitrange reduces the dynamic range of your material. That should really be the last step.

Big Mike