I've always been interested in Mastering and the Auto Mastering online services got my attention. The wave of opinions and such on automated mastering seems to range from "amazing!" to "terrible!". So, I figured I would do a little shoot out using a song I had mastered by a professional Mastering engineer.
I wanted things to be as real world as possible, but I also wanted the test to be highly accessible. So, I decided on using High Quality Mp3s encoded at 320kbps using the extreme encoding settings in Reaper. I encoded the files from the original wave file masters using Reaper 5 and the lame mp3 encoder.
In no particular order, the tracks were mastered using the following:
Advanced Auto Mastering System
LANDR
Mastering Box
A ground up self re-master of the song, which I did using reaper plugins as well as Melda Production Plugins.
A Professional Mastering Engineer - John from Massive Mastering
I created a Zip of the various audio files along with a Reaper project and put them into google drive. You can access the files here
I also put a little poll on my website at https://sites.google.com/a/levitypro...ering-shootout
Or here's a direct link to the poll:
I've got this going here and the Reaper forums. I was trying to put the poll up here, but couldn't figure it out.
Once there is a good number of responses, I'll reveal which master is which!