Hello Everyone, Just wanna share this website that promises mastering your track instantly (for free for the 1st time)

So if you wanna give it a go, here goes the link.... Cheers and Peace!

LANDR is a new online drag 'n' drop service that promises instant mastering of your music. Could this be the 'make my track sound good' silver bullet that's often been talked of? Give it a try and let us know what you think:

https://landr.com/#/


Post your comments below.

 

To me it sounds like the biggest bullshit ever...
But who knows...Maybe they found the holy grail
and by today mr. Bob Katz will be unemployed. *no*

This just say it all on the way the music industry is taking.
"You have to play to a gig tonight? Let this bot master your tracks like a pro in 20seconds."

Seems by many people the work of a pro S.E./M.E. is being considered just as a whim cause everybody, (even a bot) can do the same.
But it's clearly not like that. And it's not matter of expensive machines, just expensive ears.
And knowledge. And taste.

 

I've tried auto mastering software a while ago. Didn't work for me. Most of the time, it made my stuff worse in the end, even after reading the manual and trying several of the provided presets.

The software I tried was AAMS, which you can get here for free: http://www.curioza.com/

I may have used the software wrong, so I'm holding judgement. Someone with more expertise could get a lot out of the software for all I know. All I know is that my songs started sounding a lot better and fuller when I took the time to learn mastering, and I still don't have a full grasp of it yet.

I doubt this site is much better quality wise. It's worth a shot for anyone of course, but I think if you take the time to do sound comparisons of a track that is "auto mastered" versus a track that is mastered by someone who knows what he is doing you will see a dramatic difference.

 

I would like to revive this thread, because of the following:
1) LANDR claims to work with artificial intelligence software, that's learning with every new mix coming in. Well, it exists for a good 2 years know. A lot of time to learn. (They are talking of over 2 million tracks mastered during that time)
2) I made a search here on the forums and see it mentioned a lot, but spreaded over several dozens of threads.

What are your experiences with LANDR? What about the "learning process"? Has anybody tried the service two years ago and could now make a second try on the same mix to compare the masters? If you didn't test the site, then please consider telling why you didn't. If you did, please consider telling your experiences.

 

Instant bullshit

 

It makes your stuff louder and shift tonal balance a little. If that what mastering is to you, then it will master your software.

Mastering your song or album is generally a little more involved than that, especially if you have some sort of vision that doesn't just involve make it louder and then louderenit some more. Free is always nice - but well done is generally better than free if you can tell the difference.

The people who made LANDR put a lot of thought into it and it is just a tool that for some people who just can not see paying anyone what they are worth to actually pre-master a track or can not afford to pay anyone to do, it provides an option.

 

They put a lot of thought into how they can fuck the ignorant over.

 

Do you want some cool things about automated mastering?

There was shootout test on gearslutz, mastered versions of one track, there were real engineers, even premium one, and automated mastering services. So human mastering even premium engineer were underrated with bad sound, but Aria Mastering with their unique hybrid (analog/digital/plugin) automated systems was the best one, people voted for that mostly! Majority! So it proved, that this shit works, even not worse than real Mastering Engineers do, and sometimes better. Why do pro people with excellent acoustics control room and experience voted mostly for automated shit instead of pro-engineers? Maybe it works, maybe algorithms are improving because they are weak, maybe it is 21th century where analog almost died, digital is absolutely everywhere and robotic-automatic stuff is welcome? Maths kill physics? Now we say fuck analog, there is a lot of digital stuff which are better, but years later it probably will be: fuck humans, there are PC algorithms, faster and higher quality. Nobody believed in electricity and recorded music in 18 century, nobody believed in 1950s that huge powerful studio may exist at home in one small box called computer, nobody believed in 70s in mobile phone with hours of video,music,thousands of good quality photo,games; nobody believed in Internet etc. Now we believe that nothing can happen in future...

https://www.gearslutz.com/board/mastering-forum/1102257-automated-mastering-shootout.html

Results of poll before it was revealed:
A (unmastered original mix)
9 Votes - 21.43%
______________________________________________________________
B (MaximalSound)
5 Votes - 11.90%
______________________________________________________________
C (Budget ME)
1 Votes - 2.38%
______________________________________________________________
D (Landr)
5 Votes - 11.90%
______________________________________________________________
E (AfterMaster (Radio Ready setting))
10 Votes - 23.81%
______________________________________________________________
F (Premium ME)
1 Votes - 2.38%
______________________________________________________________
G (Aria (Mix Type B))
11 Votes - 26.19%


There are no more audiofiles anymore, but I have them. Who interested - ask me, I will upload.

 

Last edited: Aug 11, 2016

I find Landr makes music louder, but there is definite sound degradation. Artifacts and over compressed dare I say noise?

Seriously, it's long and somewhat tedious, but this video is fantastic.

 

Perhaps I haven't listened to enough tracks processed by LANDR to form a proper opinion, or enough tracks from different genres. But the one's I have heard haven't sounded massively different from what could be achieved by processing the track with a decent software limiter and some basic EQ tools. And I think many people who use this site could achieve nearly indistinguishable results given a decent monitoring set-up, some decent quality plug-ins and some practice/knowledge. All tools and skills they are likely to have if they are producing music themselves anyway.

I have an acquaintance who's attempting to earn a living by offering this service to dance music producers. He's spent quite a lot of cash building quite an idiosyncratic, mainly analogue, signal chain and even modifies the equipment he adds to it by sourcing components like transformers from the 1950's. I can definitely hear a difference when he's mastered a track, there's certainly something to getting the audio out of the box and summing it etc through non-digital components. He doesn't charge the earth per track, people seem to appreciate what he's doing and his client list is expanding all the time.

To be honest I'd rather give the cash to him than pay a ridiculous subscription fee if I was looking for a mastering engineer and especially as he produces the type of music he's mastering himself and knows what it should sound like to hit all the right spots through a club system. If you are an individual producer creating their own music, are you honestly going to master 25 tracks per month and spend $100 on a service like Aria Mastering? Why they don't offer a 'per track'/or a bunch of say 10 tracks option is ridiculous.

 

Any online "subscription" service is a scam at heart, but if one likes how this makes one's music sound, so be it. There's so much more gratification in knowing how to master one's own music (just as there is in knowing how to play and produce it). I'm still waiting to be able to squeeze something out of a tube, add water to it, and take credit for how great it sounds. I met the Landr rep at a trade show and he was a wonk.

 

Looks like a good one size fits all algorithm. Probably fits like one size fits all clothing. Definitely not taylormade just for you.

 

How many knobs has it got?

 

They put a lot of thought into making money, they didn't start LANDR to not make money.

For the people who use it, they might or might not like the result, and am sorry to say that the majority isn't really knowledgeable to even know what they are supposed to be getting. Alas, stupid people have money and there is no law against separating dumb people from the money.

Some people expect a professional ME to master their tracks at $30 a song and spend a hour on it, at those rates that guy if he has the required treated room, the gear and the experience is better off working a minimum wage job than mastering music, because he will earn more money. Also, people who undercut others 'just to get experience or exposure,' are not doing themselves a favor since if you are good at what you do you should value yourself enough to get paid for what you are worth.

It is not something I would ever use myself, but for the crowd of guys who think they have the newest hottest most banggin' track in the world but are only willing to spend ten dollars on post production - someone has to find a way to make that ten dollars actually worth taking.

 

The thing was that the Aria master was more gentle and less altering than all the other ones. I read that tread as it was developing and it just goes to show you that sometimes less is more. The original mix, competed very well with mastered mix that had very little done it, other than some slight EQ and very light compression.

In this particular example, ARIA and LANDR doing less was better, but then again if you were paying an ME and knew what you wanted, there would be at least a revision involved getting your product out and done.

 

You could probably reverse engineer what its actually doing by feeding it just tones, or specific ranges/amounts of frequencies if you really wanted into the guts of it.
Possibly even just a convolution transform based on previous inputs with similar frequency spreads? (with a whole bunch of mastered pro tracks in each genre to compare as well)
I've not read anything about these services before this topic, very interesting!

 

Interesting, indeed. That's why I revived the thread. I hoped for actual experiences with LANDR, but it seems there are none. However, the web service is successful, so why can nobody tell of experiences? Who uses the service then, if not music creators?
I searched the web and (without throwing tons of links out here, just check it for yourself) surprisingly high ratings can be found. All the tests that were highly positive, came from - DJs. It seems it is a nice tool to quickly "master" a mixtape with acceptable results.
The negative ratings came from Audio Engineers. But also Ars Technica, a publication devoted to technology in art, was disappointed. It was the only publication I found that actually reported 2014 and tested again 3 months ago - with the result that there's no progress in improvements regarding the algorithm.

So, there seems to be 2 possibilities. The website is either a big fraud, because instead of artificial intelligence there might be just running a loudness maximizer. Or the technological advancements are so slow that there's no noticable progress even after 2 years and over 2 million masters. I tend to the former.

Regarding music I'm convinced there will be new technologies helping in domains that were supposed to be human-only. People thought a computer would never be able to beat a human in playing chess - until it did. People thought a computer would never be able to beat a human in playing Go - until it did. People thought it would never happen that a computer could identify a person on a photo, and they thought a car would never be driven by a computer. To err is human

But I don't think we are at the point yet. At least LANDR isn't. Feel free to prove me wrong though. I'd love to see the future today!

 

One knob!

 

I think this has that "magic mastering" preset from fabfilter saturn on like 30% mix and a limiter applied.

 

You are looking for your answer in the wrong place. People listen at different intensities. This service is for people who listen at a low level.

The pro audio creator, producer, engineer with an abundance of experience and software tools available to them, listens intensely and is the least likely to try this.

LANDAR is for creators that are just starting out and do not have the experience or tools to master themselves.
You might find a few newbies here, but many of us are experts and are not interested enough to even try this out.