Master Your Songs Online For Free @ LANDR
MixGenius has launched LANDR, an online mastering platform which can be used for free as long as you download your music in 192 kbps MP3 format.Drag-and-drop your mix-down to get an instant mastered preview which you can download in minutes. Tweak a few controls to refine your sound, and download!
Although mastering your music to 192 kbps MP3 files is a ridiculous idea in most cases, it’s actually the exact format you’d need for use on SoundCloud and similar streaming services. So, let’s take a look at LANDR and see what this platform offers for the price of free.
Mastering and free are two words which can hardly fit into the same sentence. For more than one good reason, too. Mastering is an advanced skill and a fine art at the same time, taking years and years of experience and hard work to become good at. It also requires a good listening room, perfectly treated to minimize the non-linearities caused by phasing and such.
So where does an automatic service like LANDR fit into the elite world of mastering? Can a website which takes your non-mastered track and returns the mastered version of it within minutes really do any good? I gave it a try and it did beat my expectations, although they were pretty low to begin with.
Just a little disclaimer. I’m well aware that an algorithm can never match the work of a real mastering expert. Every song is different, and there’s more to mastering than just tweaking parameters based on calculations. BUT – before I uploaded the test file, I though that I’d be perfectly happy with this if the program made the track loud enough to be used on SoundCloud and if it didn’t mess it up (made it sound worse than the mix). After all, what more can you expect from a free mastering service which runs on auto-pilot?
So, I’ve uploaded a mix of one of my recent tracks to LANDR and it basically took more time to upload the WAV file than to wait for the results. After the file was processed (I think I waited 5 minutes for this at most), I signed up for a free user account and downloaded the free master preview. This preview file is the same thing as what you’d get as a paid member, except that it’s downgraded to low bitrate MP3 format. Paid members can download full quality MP3 files and WAVs too.
The resulting master wasn’t breathtaking, it had several weak points too. But it wasn’t completely bad either. The loudness was good (at the cost of slight over-compression), the kick drum was more prominent, the percussion sounded better. Overall, the sound was a bit over-hyped and some parts of the track which were meant to be quieter were now as loud as everything else. The mid frequencies were skewed.
Bottom line, it matched my expectations and even performed a bit better than that. I wasn’t really expecting too much from it, though. The resulting master was acceptable for use on SoundCloud, or for playing a brand new track out live before paying for real mastering.
Give this one a try and let me know what you think. How does LANDR work on your music?
Some good points so far from the discussion in the comments section:
Sharing your music before releasing it official isn’t safe. (good point by Irion Da Ronin)
Compared to real mastering, the results are sub-par. (reported by Steven Walsh)
If you prefer doing things your way, take a look at our collection of free mastering plugins.
