- Computers are central to our music-making lives, and the range of tasks producers carry out themselves has developed accordingly. Slowly, production has expanded to include programming, engineering and mixing. For those brave enough, it includes mastering, too. However, this final step has retained a mystique above all other processes, with many producers taking their tracks to the mix stage but no further.
Many of us see professional mastering as a necessary final step. There are a number of reasons for this. For starters, a fresh pair of highly trained ears is always desirable at this final stage, to fight off overfamiliarity with the source material. Secondly, there's a feeling that mastering requires a technical understanding of sound that goes beyond the skill of simply making a great track. Producers are aware that their final files need to be rendered a certain way to sound great on the radio or in a live set, but they don't know the precise settings to achieve these goals. And lastly, there's perhaps a sense that if we to master our own work, we'll end up messing up the sounds of our mixes rather than improving them. The bespoke tools mastering engineers reach for—including multiband compressors, loudness maximizers and stereo enhancers—might not be ones with which we've familiarized ourselves, prompting understandable doubt.
For most, whether or not to have tracks professionally mastered is a question of money, even though mastering costs have tumbled in recent years. Also, plenty of mastering houses now offer an online service, so that it's possible to rapidly turn around tracks. Online mastering has always involved a human being receiving those tracks and working his or her magic on them, though. Landr may be set to change all of that: while this online mastering solution also promises great sounding tracks, no person will be responsible for creating them. Instead, Landr uses an intelligent software algorithm for mastering. Is it possible to configure a computer program that can master music in a satisfying way?
Landr has been created by the Canadian company MixGenius, and its mastering algorithm is the result of extended university research, along with the support of top audio professionals who have helped refine Landr's capabilities. The service offers four subscription models to cater to your mastering needs. The free service provides an unlimited number of 192kbps mp3s without payment, which is also available within all of the paid-for subscription models, too. Pro adds four uncompressed WAV masters for $9 per month, and Pro Unlimited provides an endless supply of mastered WAVs for $19 per month.
To use Landr, you'll first need to upload your unmastered file. Landr provides good advice about how to prepare this for the best quality results, including removing compression and leaving sufficient headroom. Then, from the homepage, you can either drag-and-drop your file or browse to its location on your hard drive. A progress bar keeps you updated on upload status, and it changes to show that your track is being mastered by the Landr engine. This process will complete within a minute, with the website then toggling playback between your original uploaded mix and Landr's master of it. The only option available for tweaking is intensity, which can be switched between low, medium and high. In practice, this controls the output gain in Landr's loudness maximizer, with high results slammed considerably harder than low, as you'd expect. Again, Landr will preview all three of these options as you click on them. The Send And Save button then emails you a link to your freshly mastered file.
None of this will matter, of course, if Landr's masters don't sound good. I started by uploading a pop mix with a wide dynamic range that also features a frequency stretch heading into the chorus—a significant boost in both bass and top end to give this section lift-off. Landr coped very well, producing a rounded result that dealt with this step-up nicely. Personally, I would have liked a hint more treble in the final master, but this is personal taste; I'm not suggesting that Landr's master was treble-light. Next, I uploaded an instrumental piece for piano and full string orchestra. The nature of this track was much more delicate, but again, Landr coped well, responding impressively to the dynamic flow without the growing bass presence of the track sucking the life out of the top end. After that, I tried a more minimal track, featuring a wide stereo image and a deep front-to-back mix. Its very dry elements were countered by others processed with heavy reverb. Here, the high-intensity option struggled slightly with the reverb tails set against the the dry sound sources. This was also true when I put the mix through a rough-and-ready mastering chain of my own—I needed far more detailed settings to keep this sense of width and space consistent. Overall, though, Landr coped admirably with the tests I threw at it, producing convincing masters based upon a wide range of material in super-quick time.
So, will Landr see the death of the specialist mastering engineer? No. Does it produce tracks that sound genuinely mastered? Yes. However, like with any automated process, its inability to respond to the specific needs of an individual piece of music ensures that professional mastering engineers will live to fight another day. If you gave an unmastered track to two different mastering engineers, you'd get two different-sounding tracks back. The differences might be subtle, but they'd be there. Upload the same track to Landr twice and you'll get the same result back both times. You might argue that this is a strength—getting the same file back removes doubt, as this is clearly the definitive master. I don't agree. Just as working with any dedicated audio professional taps into their wealth of musical experience, so the golden ears of mastering engineers remain valuable. That's not to disparage what Landr does, which is hugely impressive. It's winning awards for its technology and, in blind listening tests, its results are standing up extremely well against professionally mastered tracks.
I guess it boils down to whether or not you'd use a preset from a mastering plug-in like iZotope Ozone to carry out the final stage of processing on your tracks. If you would, try Landr instead, as in 99 percent of cases, its intelligent algorithm sounds better than an Ozone preset. However, if you're familiar enough with Ozone to tweak its settings, or there's a mastering engineer you work with whose masters you admire, I doubt Landr will convince you that you can trust it more than a human's judgement. As its provision for supplying 192kbps mp3s is free, however, there's little to stop you trying it for yourself.
Ratings:
Ease of use: 5/5
Cost: 5/5
Sound: 4/5
Versatility: 1.5/5