Online Mastering Service

Mixing and mastering are often confused because of the similar methods and tools involved, but they are two separate and important steps in the song creation process. Mixing generally refers to the individual track arrangements within a multitrack recording, whereas mastering is the final polish on a mix.

QUALITY CONTROL: This involves fixing any small errors or oversights in the original mix, such as pops and clicks, and correcting other small mistakes that jump out once a mix is amplified.

STEREO ENRICHMENT: When done correctly, this allows your audio to sound much bigger by broadening spacial balance (left to right) and also tightens the center image by focusing low-end frequencies.

EQ: This refers to correction of spectral imbalances and enhancement of any elements that might need to pop a bit more. Great mastering is balanced and proportional, so no random frequencies should be left standing out. A balanced master should sound even across every playback system.

DYNAMICS: Compression improves the dynamic range of your song. It raises the quieter frequencies in the mix while maintaining louder signals. Compression bonds the song together and gives it a stronger feeling of uniformity.

LOUDNESS: Generally the last process in a mastering chain is the use of a limiter, which affects the song’s overall amount of loudness and creates a peak ceiling. Limiting boosts the track to sound competitively loud without clipping or distorting.

SAMPLE RATE & BIT DEPTH CONVERSION: Dither is dependent on the final output medium. If you are planning to release on CD, for example, you’ll want to convert to 44.1kHz 16 bit and may have to convert and dither your file to be the correct file format.

HANDLES & SEQUENCING: Sequencing refers to putting your audio tracks in order (generally for an album), and handles refers to how much silence you put between each track in the sequence.

LANDR and other comparable online mastering services have an established linear set of processes that “master” your music. Since these services are basically computer algorithms, they work in the same way every time (ex: EQ, then Multiband Compression, then limiting). This can be problematic at times because a computer is not able to make as many analytical choices when it comes to artistic choices and personal preferences. For example, sometimes a song doesn’t artistically call for any additional compression. A mastering engineer can make this call based off past experience, but the computer will process the audio the same way it always does and likely add some compression. In the end, while the convenience factors of LANDR and other online mastering services make them appealing, you usually end up with an inferior product because the mastering process is not being adjusted specifically to the needs of the source material.

Simply put, the ‘loudness wars’ refers to a philosophy amongst music creators that louder is literally better. If you can make your music louder than everyone else, people will be able to hear it from farther away and physiologically like it better. If you compare music from before loudness normalization to music of today, you’ll see that there is some logic to the argument. The human brain does perceive something louder as sounding better. Loudness normalization is the process of measuring the loudness of a piece of music, then using the reading to lower the level to a standard reference level. For example, YouTube’s reference level is -14 LUFS, so if a song is analyzed to be -10 LUFS, YouTube will lower the level by 4DBs to bring it to the reference of -14 LUFS. Loudness normalization was created to combat varying loudness when listening to multiple songs in a sequence. Before loudness normalization, one song in a playlist might be quieter than the rest, so the end listener would have to turn up a volume knob to adjust the playback volume. Then, if the next song in the playlist were super loud, the listener would have to turn the volume back down. This leads to a terrible user experience where listeners are constantly adjusting a volume knob. Because of loudness normalization, being louder is no longer the focus; dynamics are!

Apple Digital Masters is the new name for Apple’s Mastered for iTunes (MFiT) program. The program is based around a procedure developed by Apple specifically for Mastering Engineers to follow. This set of tools allows Mastering Engineers to audition Apple’s proprietary encoding during the mastering process and take into account how music will eventually interact with Apple’s encoding. In addition to auditioning the encoder, there is also a tool (called afclip) that processes the audio file and creates a text file for audio clips. Because of this special encoding process, extra attention must be paid to headroom and inter-sample peaking while mastering.

Mastering ensures that your music sounds great across all platforms. Whether your song was recorded at home or in a professional studio, it still needs the final step of mastering to sound its best. Professional mastering allows songs and albums to sound consistently balanced across the board, while tracks that aren’t mastered may sound disjointed when played in sequence.  Mastering allows your music to sound balanced, complete, and ready for commercial distribution across any platform.

Send a stereo WAV file at the highest sample rate and bit depth at which the recording was created. The final mix should be peaking around no more than -3DBs and stereo bus compression should ideally be gentle (unless there’s an artistic reason for the contrary). Please do not use any limiting on the files you send. Lastly, if you have any reference mixes or masters, please send them along with notes on what you like and want emulated in those mixes.