The supposedly secret dark art of mastering is actually nothing of the sort; it’s just good ol’ practice and experience. A mastering engineer will learn how to listen to the material in a particular way, to hear its spectral and dynamic makeup and have an understanding of what, therefore, should or should not be done.
They will have intimate knowledge of the way in which different processors respond to and colour audio, and will have developed specific approaches for different types of music, as well as knowledge of the technical requirements of different publishing media and platforms. So there really is no mystery to it, just an awful lot of expertise that takes time to develop.
For many years there have been plugins that help you to slightly sidestep the need for that expertise by wrapping a collection of common mastering processors into a single plugin with simple descriptive controls. These can save you from needing to hire a mastering engineer or splash the cash on a full collection of mastering-grade processors.
However, such plugins still rely on a degree of mastering knowledge and so aren’t a magic bullet solution.
What may be a magic bullet, though, are the expanding crop of online AI-powered mastering services. We figured it was about time we checked some out to see just how good they are, and whether they compare to the work of an experienced mastering engineer.
Testing times
To this end we have signed up with four online. ], eMastered [], LANDR Mastering [], and Masterchannel [. ]. For a comparison to how a human may do things, we have enlisted the services of a chap who has been Future’s go-to audio mastering engineer for over 25 years.
