If you have forgotten about Logic’s little brother, go back and give it a peek. It may not fit in a compositional workflow, but for practice and idea generation, the Magic band feature is very cool. You have it, it’s free. Go back and give it a look.
If you are one of the many home recording geeks like me, you realize that you aren’t going to be paying a real life mastering engineer to clean up your mess before you give it to your friends.
If you want to do what you can to get it sounding sweet after your mix, then take in as much information as you can on mastering. The art of the eq, compression, limiting, etc that these guys have mastered is extremely valuable to making your mix sound awesome in any audio system. For a kick start, there is a great 4 part video series on MixOnline.com with Mastering Engineer Mike wells. I have watched them all and highly recommend them.
On a related note, next week, Microsoft is hosting a Mastering series with 4 mastering engineers that I have been lucky enough to get invited to. I’ll be sure to share my tips from the control room when I get back.
Check out the vids at http://mixonline.com/video/mastering_prepare_session/