eMastered, free automated online mastering service

Stumbled upon this site recently and thought it might be nice to share.

https://emastered.com/

It surely can’t replace a proper engineer, but for quick results it’s actually not bad or if you want to refresh some of your older songs. I’ve tried a whole bunch of songs and had mixed results with it. From my experience it works best with EDM songs but not so great for ambient. The service tends to emphasize the bass area quite a bit and seems to take out mids, but if you counter that a bit in your mix before uploading you can get pretty decent results for a quick automated master. Also make sure to leave -3 to -6db headroom in your mix.

I suppose at some point they will start charging for the service, but for now it might be a nice tool to have. :slight_smile:

Is it just me not leaving enough head room or eMastering applying too much compression on the track? Any way, I didn’t like the results, sounds too over compressed and squashed. Highs are very excessive and the bass even tends to duck the rest at some points. Probably suited for big room EDM house/techno but my personal tracks (D&B/Drumfunk) couldn’t benefit from this service.

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Yes, it trys to go for that commercial loudness and squishes quite a bit. From my experiments it helped thinning out the mix before uploading to counter it being way to bass heavy. For example thinning out the bass areas with a highpass filter and giving a small wide boost in the mid range. If songs are too busy and compressed it seems to fuckup, but even on an ambient drone song i had it one time, with the mentioned bass dropouts overpowering everything. Another dubstep song i’ve tried benefited nicely and sounded more clear afterwards, so it really seems to depend on what you throw at it. It’s also a nice drum fattener if you run a few samples rendered to a bigger wave through it. For free i won’t complain, just another tool. :slight_smile:

I haven’t tried this one, but i have used AAMS quite a bit and at first i thought it was pretty neat, but i realised it’s not all that great and sometimes it makes track sounds worse, even with a lot of headroom. It works to some extent, but i don’t think any mastering engineers lose their jobs over it. I’ve tried it on probably 30-40 tracks and none of them sound like the modern compressed tracks that is mastered properly. Of course parts of the blame for this has to be addressed to my amateurish mixing abilities. I find if i use a less aggressive reference style i get better results, though volume will not compete with commercial tracks i think it at least doesn’t sound completely squashed.

I find that using various free plugins like FerricTDS, Nova67P, OTT etc. on the master track usually makes better results, so i haven’t been using AAMS for a while.

Now i haven’t tried this one yet, but i suspect it’s somewhat similar to AAMS. I’ll give it a go and test it on a couple of tracks.

I haven’t tried this one, but i have used AAMS quite a bit and at first i thought it was pretty neat, but i realised it’s not all that great and sometimes it makes track sounds worse, even with a lot of headroom.

That’s been my experience. Once I got a basic understanding of compression (and its alter-ego, limiting) and EQ I found I could get much better results on my own.

I’d now never recommend AAMS to anyone (aside from dubious results it’s quite buggy, and the author of the software tells people to downgrade Windows security; as best I can tell he is incapable of writing robust apps for even remotely current versions of Windows.)

Far better to spend time understanding the tools in Renoise (or, for me, Reaper, for the final prep work after I finish a song in Renoise).

I gave it a try and so far no good results at all. My own “master” sounds much better, actually both louder and less compressed than the auto-master regardless of how much headroom i give it.

This is not something i would recommend for mastering your tracks, but it might perhaps be useful for making a reference track, so that you may compare it with your own mastering progress. As i often find that i make bad decisions on “tired” ears this could be a way to test if i’m on the right track or if i’m way off and need to relax my ears a bit before continuing.

Mastering isn’t something i spend much time on because i try to do as much as possible in the mix instead. Once i got a mix i’m ok with, i experiment with some VSTs like the above mentioned plugins. I usually use FerricTDS as the last plugin in the chain experimenting around the “mastering” presets as i find it to work quite well at preventing clipping and smoothing out harshness introduced earlier in the chain.

I’m starting to get a better understanding of the frequency spectrum and how important it is to get the mix right and this very simple fact: More volume doesn’t necessarily mean louder.

Less bass can sound a lot beefier for instance, add a HP filter to every track that doesn’t need the bass frequencies, turn it up as far as possible. The point is that you want to remove the frequencies you can’t distinctively hear in the mix, but which steals headroom for the kick and bass and such. It’s very important with the bass frequencies, but the same thing applies to the high and mid frequencies also depending on what you’re mixing. I would be careful using a LP filter for this purpose though, often i would recommend using EQ to dampen the frequencies instead of filtering straight off, but this again depends on the rest of the mix.

A thumb of rule could be something like: If you can’t hear it, remove it.

Yes, it’s probably not for experienced users, but for someone starting out or who just wants a quick reference track. I still found it useful for some older dull sounding tracks to get a quick more commercial sounding mix without much effort. It’s also possible to mix that automaster with your original song and simulate a kind of parallel compression effect. Just be creative. :slight_smile:

Got a mail stating, the free mode will only work till 31st August and afterwards it will be a paid service with an improved engine. Well, so much for that.

Haha, yeah good luck with that. :stuck_out_tongue:

https://www.landr.com/en

https://www.masterlizer.com/index.aspx

https://www.masteringbox.com/

http://www.adgmastering.com/

http://www.sageaudio.com/

http://www.basskraft.com/

Interesting reading:

http://blog.sonicbids.com/is-instant-online-mastering-worth-it

I tested out the first one landr and it sound waaay better than emastered, actually i’m very impressed with how the preview sounded like, better than my own “master”.

There is also Cloudbounce which got integrated into Tracktion recently and Aria.

https://www.cloudbounce.com/

https://ariamastering.com/

Interesting you mention Landr as your favorite, before i tried eMasterred i did checkout this video because of the Tracktion Cloudbounce integration and there it was apparently the worst sounding. Just shows how vastly different results can be for everyone.

Interesting you mention Landr as your favorite, before i tried eMasterred i did checkout this video because of the Tracktion Cloudbounce integration and there it was apparently the worst sounding. Just shows how vastly different results can be for everyone.

I tried it on the metal track i posted a few days ago and only heard preview from a small portion of the song. What works for this sort of metal does maybe not sound good on electronic stuff maybe? I was very surprised by how good it sounded. I thought i had done an ok job on this track, but landr seemed to make it even beefier.

i use it in the track that’s on my signature