LANDR Auto Mastering

I happened across this from a CD Baby post and thought it was worth looking into, anything which can add the professional mastering sheen' in a cost effective way has to be good - especially the time it can save in tinkering with masters to try and get them as polished as possible. There is also the element of testing my mastering skills - how will they stand up against the system?!

To try it out I am using my current track in progress (a cover of Apache by the Shadows).

First impression wasn't great as it recommended uploading highest res version, so I exported a 24 bit 192khz version that it had been recorded in...turns out the highest res LANDR accepts is 92khz, only discovered after waiting half an hour for the 220MB upload to finish and get an error. So, re-exported at 96khz and 24bit.

Once it was uploaded and mastered I then downloaded the free (which is a nice touch) mp3 mastered version from LANDR's site . To compare I took my own master of the track and ran it through adobe audition to create a similar 16 bit 192 kps track.

First listen on my Mackie HR624 mk1 monitors, the LANDR'd version was smoother, and definitely weightier in the bass registers. My master definitely had a harder more brittle quality in the midrange. The LANDR version also reproduced a long reverb tail better in the staccato middle section where it can be heard pretty clearly. These differences could be in part due to the MP3 encoding and differences in the quality there.

One issue going this way for mastering is that fades have to be done ahead of time (which isn't generally recommended) or added afterwards...ok if you are going for lossless wav format, but not good if you have to re-encode an mp3 to add them in.

CD Quality Versions

So to really check out the auto master I paid my $9.99 to get the full  44.1khz 16 bit version. A/B'ing that against my mastered track - firstly, despite me not running my master hot at all, it was still a db or so louder than the LANDR one, so they definitely aren't going for peak loudness.

The LANDR version clearly had the treble rolled off compared to mine where I had only done some very minor eq tweaks. This treble roll off whilst adding a smoothness to the mix also seemed to take some of the 'space' in the mix away - which could be considered adding cohesion to the mix. To get the same sound required just under 2 dbs rolled off at around 2khz. Considering none of the instruments had any treble applied I was slightly surprised at this, so thought perhaps SONAR had somehow made the track slightly more prominant in the treble registers when exporting, so checked against the track in Sonar and this wasn't the case.
 

Remixing for Smoothness

So to try and get the best of both worlds it was back into Sonar and taking out the same 2db notch on the more prominant instruments to get the same smoothness so the master wasn't having to do a lot of remedial EQ. I then still notched out a little more tightly around 2khz to add a little more smoothness without affecting the overall treble response.

The Two Masters

I balanced the relative volumes of the two for the purposes of comparison - the links are to soundcloud where you can download the two wav files to compare.

LANDR Master

My Master