Snares and cymbals get similarly “esh”-y. It did provide “focus” to the vocals, but almost too much – it feels like itÂ addedÂ a bigÂ presence bump to the thing around 1500hz or so. There’s a definite harshness to the upper midrange. But aside from that, there are a few issues. Â Unsurprisingly, the version without the bus processing had the highest crest factor and dynamic range of the three, while the bus processed versions (mine and LANDR’s) came in pretty closely – mine was about 1.5db less, but I also pushed the whole thing into the limiter about 2db harder while trying to match the loudness of LANDR’s preview. Â Both LANDR versions came in around -11/-12 LUFS (EBU R128+18), and both were hovering around a mean RMS of +4db (K-14). Some things worked pretty much as expected. Â This is evident in some of the analysis I did. In the end it turns out I pushed my own master slightly harder than LANDR did theirs. It does not appear to have trouble there. I was interested primarily in seeing if mixing with a buscomp (as many engineers do) would mess up its algorithms. You can hear a bit of the missing saturation and some of the glue that the buscomp brings in, but the output is pretty consistent. On the plus side, it handled my bus-processed and unprocessed versions fairly identically. Â I previewed both low and high intensity as well, and while low I think gave better results (high was awfully overcompressed) it was also barely distinguishable from the original unmastered version. LANDR gives you choices for â€œintensityâ€, which as far as I can tell means â€œhow hard it hits the final stage limiter/clipper.â€ Â I selected “medium” intensity for the song, since it seemed a good fit.

Â I used their guidelines for 6db of headroom.

Everything sourced form 24bit/44.1khz wavs. To make it a fair comparison I exported mine as a 192kbps mp3 like theirs. Â IÂ also bounced one that I quickly mastered myself. I have presented it with two versions – one with my usual array of 2bus post-processing (a SSL-style compressor and a tape sim), and one with no bus processing whatsoever. Â Itâ€™s a track with a fair amount of dynamic range, a fairly open mix, and it has a bit of nuance that I thought might better display what LANDR does and does not do – a banging EDM track would probably sound fine no matter what, since those tend to be low on subtle dynamic shifts. I tossed our track â€œWardrobeâ€ at LANDR to see what would happen. It’s a definite improvement, and better than bad mastering, but it’s not exactly good mastering either. The tl dr version: pro mastering engineers donâ€™t have to start worrying yet. Â But since LANDR gives any new signup two free â€œlow resolutionâ€ downloads of mastered tracks, that seemed to be enough for a quick check of their claims. My tests arenâ€™t scientific, were pretty roughly tossed-off in a short amount of time, and have a pretty small sample size, so I canâ€™t call them definitive in any way. Â I thought it might be interesting to try it with this new version and see whatâ€™s improved. Â A claim that cannot go unchallenged.īrian Hazard of Resonance Mastering already did a pretty in-depth comparison of their early version. Â Their claim is that it provides â€œmore focus, color and dynamicsâ€ and â€œrivals professional engineers.â€ LANDR, an online automatic mastering service, just announced a major upgrade to their service.

(originally published at the Null Device Blog)

Landr bounces