LANDR Mastering. Any thoughts and/or opinions on this relatively new mastering platform?

Curious if any audio jungle authors use, or have used, LANDR mastering?

Many of the electronic digital only record labels are using it, it gives pretty good results on dance music (not as good as a skilled engineer though) but can’t say how it works on other genres unfortunately

Right, I was curious how it stood up against a real engineer. I’ve tried a few tracks (stylistically cinematic/thematic), kinda lacked a bit of depth and warmth compared to a mastering engineer. But haven’t tried it on any other styles as of yet, would be interesting to get a feeler for how it performs across different styles/genres.

The couple of masters I’ve heard from LANDR did not sound too impressive. Sounded pretty much like it just added some top end with a shelf filter and then some compression and limiting…can’t remember if there was some stereo widening stuff going on.

It probably makes a good mix sound like a finished product but I would never compare it to a real mastering engineer. Bear in mind though that my sample size is very small :slightly_smiling:

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You can’t expect much from a 30 second mastering session. I only tested the free membership and I don’t think it did much of anything. It might get more in depth if you pay for the pro membership, but I doubt it. This seems more like it’s for people who have no experience with having tracks mastered and no knowledge of how it’s done or why.

In my opinion, and that of many who have done production music for a long time, it’s better to not master your music. All you need is a very good final mix with minimal polish. The music is going to often be tailored to the need in terms of EQ, compression, etc, during post production, plus it’s often under dialog. You might end up making changes that make the file more difficult to work with. Another thing is that in production music library situations, your tracks might be placed on a project album and will be somewhat “mastered” to match elements of the other tracks on that compilation by the library’s choice of mastering engineer. It’s not the same as listen music.

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For a robot it’s actually pretty impressive. If you don’t have the know-how or plugins/equipment it’s a viable option for production music Imho. But if you do know what you’re doing, it’s pretty easy to beat.

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It’s better than nothing, but no substitute for the human ear. Even if you have little to no experience of mastering I’d recommend doing it yourself using the tools in your DAW and a few google searches for help.

That would be better than paying for what’s obviously a preset from something like Ozone plugged-into an online interface. There are tons of YouTube tutorials on mastering, which is made out to be much more mysterious than it actually is. Of course a mastering engineer is going to get a much better result than the average person, but the average person can get a very good result by learning even just the basics if they already know how to compose, record and mix in a DAW.

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I think the concept of it is pretty revolutionary but for reletively the same price you can get some real ears to master it, yeilding better results and more human touch.

Late to the party on this thread, but figured I’d add my thoughts since I recently had experience with LANDR.

Out of curiosity I used their freebies on some mixes I had recently mastered so I could compare. I’m not a specialized mastering engineer by any means, but my masters were a tad louder and with more dynamics retained. Granted I only kept the least aggressive option from LANDR (the other settings weren’t usable IMO), so the fact that mine was louder probably isn’t a huge deal (anyone can make something louder). But mine retained detail and punch in the low end while the LANDR results seemed more muddy, and overall was less transparent and interesting.

I don’t think the gentlest setting is unusable, so I suppose if it’s all you’ve got, it’s something. But as others have said, I think it’s pretty easy to beat with halfway decent ears and a little bit of knowledge. Even just with something like Slate’s FG-X and a good EQ, it’s pretty easy to beat LANDR’s results.