This could put a lot of mastering engineers out of business

The Subject line is sarcasm.

Saw an ad on FB for this website. Thought it would be interesting to hear what you folks thought about it.

From their About page:

"LANDR revolutionizes the mastering process with drag-and-drop simplicity, achieving results that rival professional studio work in minutes. This opens up a world of possibilities for producers: LANDR your demos before sharing them, drop in full length DJ mixes or live recordings, make a track on the road and have it mastered in time for your gig the same night. LANDR lets you integrate mastering seamlessly into your creative process.

A.I. From the Heart

MixGenius incubated and refined algorithms developed over eight years of university research, testing and tweaking based on feedback from trained audio experts. Our team is composed of music industry veterans - award winning mixing engineers, top-level DSP programmers, musicians, producers and label owners - who know exactly what the mastering process needs to deliver.

LANDR is smart and getting smarter. Its true beauty lies in its ability to learn. Our system is built around an adaptive engine that ‘listens’ and reacts to music, using micro-genre detection to make subtle frame-by-frame adjustments selectively using tools like multi-band compression, EQ, stereo enhancement, limiting and aural excitation based on the unique properties of the song. Basically, the more we throw at LANDR, the better it gets.

The Simple Truth

Rather than present an overwhelming array of options, LANDR presents one. Great design is all about limiting the field. We’ve added just a couple of carefully selected options to guide LANDR to produce the perfect master for you. If you feel comfortable in front of 40 different knobs, then try out one of the many quality mastering plugins out there, then compare the results to what LANDR can do. We’re confident you’ll hear the difference."

Been there, tried it quickly, they add about 2-3 dB to a file. That should be enough to convince almost everybody, since louder tracks are perceived as sounding better (psycho-acoustics).

My experience with navigating the site was already very irritating and annoying and I'll unsubscribe again. In Dutch we have an expression for what seem like empty promises: baked air. That's what this feels like.

OK, finally could download my test file. It is in fact 5 dB louder. I'll take off those 5 dB and compare.

OK, I compared them at equal loudness: there appears to be some high end added, and the bass was dialed down (!) a smidge. But also there was a loss of punchyness (well, the track I submitted was already "mastered" by me, so it's not completely fair).

In spite of the troubles I had signing up and navigating the site, I will use it again, just to see if this site can provide a better master than I can. Next time I'll submit a PCM with 3-6 dB headroom.

But in the end I'd rather have a plugin that does what this site says it does. But maybe this businessmodel works better, or maybe they do not want to expose their algorithms to reverse engineers...

Top: original, bottom: LANDR-master.

Thanks for your efforts and commentary Erik!

Cool that you gave it a try and posted your results. Seems like it's sort of a cookie cutter mastering service. The price is very cheap that's for sure but algorithms are not the same as a trained ear.

I'll be curious to hear more about your experience with this company.

It would be cool if you posted a snippet of one of your tests before and after.

Thanks again.