I’m a little confused.
First I see an iPad mastering app for $20 USD. I thought that was impressive.
Then I read about how difficult mastering is, and how you should only trust a professional mastering guy with your mastering…
Now I see this web app where you can drag & drop a WAV file and it gets mastered for you.
What’s the deal? My audio sounds “better” after using it but I’m not a mastering engineer 
My take on it is that mastering a piece of music is a craft, founded in human decisions.
The job of a mastering engineer is to manage the sounds from each track in such a fashion that the musical intent of the whole is best presented to the typical listener.
Some parts of this can be fairly well automated. Ducking the main melody in a club beat every time the bass drum pounds on the beat is not rocket science. Balancing the audio from twenty different microphones taking in an opera with a full orchestra is a highly skilled and very difficult craft, partly because it deals with level management in different tracks to lend emphasis to the parts of the sound which people in the audience would pick up naturally, but which a listener at home lacks the cues to appreciate, or which your typical home sound system won’t elevate enough. Sometimes your main line will be the trumpets playing a very loud fanfare, sometimes it’s a flute and a clarinet playing a delicate duet.
My main point is that to make those delicate decisions, and execute them, requires an understanding of musical intent and context, which is largely a function of intelligence, which is an unsolved problem in computer science.
On the other hand, picking out crisp highs and hammering the oontz-oontz-oontz for a club beat is not that hard, and readily automated. I can see how a neural net or genetically trained algorithm could do a decent job of those.
If you’re using a DAW like renoise, it would not do any harm to learn something about the basics of mastering, and once you have that sorted out, you won’t need landr.
Ok, but did anyone knowledgeable on the matter actually tried it?
Not that I would need that, just out of curiosity…
I can’t call myself an expert in any way, but I’ve mastered a few albums for friends, so I decided to try this with a song I mastered few months ago.
To me, it sounds like they’ve just added a (most likely single-band) compressor, stereo expander and a limiter with some automated settings.
There might be some subtle saturator/exiter or an automatic eq curve as well, but it’s hard to tell.
for that part, it actually does it’s job quite well. However it still sounds quite ‘muddy’ compared to original mastered song.
I’m not really into going to more technical details, but If you’re interested in comparing the audio
I uploaded the landr preview here:www.dropbox.com/s/e5oka8b0xba0gon/LANDR-2_pre.mp3
and you can hear the original mastered version here:https://soundcloud.com/crummykids/sofiabukarest-silver
I have to admit the mixdown on that song isn’t the best ever. You’d probably have better results with some perfectly mixed oonz-oonz-oonz, but still the quality would be far from professional mastering.
Imagine if there was a synth plugin with only a ‘generate great sound’ button that would generate sound that would just sound amazing and suit your song perfectly.
Of course such thing couldn’t exists simply because there’s no artificial intelligence (currently) that could that could replace all the artistic stuff etc. human brain is capable of.
It’s the same thing with mastering: you simply can’t replace all that creative brain power with a AI.
also agree with everythingJan Koekepan wrote
Instead of paying $9 a month for this, I would spend some time learning the basic mastering process.
Really, it won’t be that hard to get equally good result by yourself, and learning that stuff really helps you with mixing your songs as well.
also agree with everything[background=#f0f0ed]Jan Koekepan wrote :)[/background]
Awww, thanks. Since I’m being shamelessly flattered, let me give a tip for people new to mastering, based on my own highly unscientific approach:
You’ve recorded, entered, or otherwise set all your tracks. All the right notes are at all the right places. But when you listen to it on the best speakers you have, it sounds like crap. Why? Because something is washing out something else, because your drums are overwhelming your synths on the beat, somehow all your tracks are not playing like well coordinated elements, and on top of it all your top lead keeps getting unintended distortion.
One approach I have heard of for live bands making recordings is to keep working in a studio until the headphone mix sounds right. At that point, there probably is almost no mastering left to be done - which shows you what the point of mastering is. Getting it to sound right.
The good news is that Renoise gives you the tools to make this easy.
Imagine if there was a synth plugin with only a ‘generate great sound’ button that would generate sound that would just sound amazing and suit your song perfectly.
Of course such thing couldn’t exists simply because there’s no artificial intelligence (currently) that could that could replace all the artistic stuff etc. human brain is capable of.
It’s the same thing with mastering: you simply can’t replace all that creative brain power with a AI.
The human brain is also capable of hearing something that isn’t there, so there are both advantages and disadvantages. This thing would probably give the same result every time, while a human brain could never achieve the exact same result.
At this point i’m not so shure i could do the job better than this thing myself to be honest. I’m honestly not so shure i prefer your original master from the landr one either.
BTW: I just made a doofer that makes it easier than ever before to remove unwanted harmonics from your track, a 96 Band EQ doofer with tuned sliders, so be shure to check it out in the tips and tricks section. 
Are we getting mixerazation and masterizing mixed up here? Also, are Landr results superior to some semi-knowledgeable fumbling through Ozone presets? It’s interesting, but I hate subscription consumering for some reason.
Are we getting mixerazation and masterizing mixed up here?
In my arrogant opinion, they bleed into each other so much that there’s little meaningful distinction. I consider them to be two parts of the same big job.
In my arrogant opinion, they bleed into each other so much that there’s little meaningful distinction. I consider them to be two parts of the same big job.
Well, we’re discussing this landr tool which masters an already mixed track, it’s not supposed to mix the track for you or tweak your arrangements.
Well, we’re discussing this landr tool which masters an already mixed track, it’s not supposed to mix the track for you or tweak your arrangements.
Granted, but we’re also drawing a comparison between the whole manual mastering context and what Landr can or cannot do for you.
If you have Renoise, a laptop, a decent set of headphones and a week to work, I’m sure that at least half the people on this forum could do a mastering job on an album which would blow Landr completely out of the water, which is why I suggested that maruchan learn to master using Renoise, rather than spending money on Landr.