![]() “There’s no way these services can ever be true competition. that is something that even the best AI in the world wouldn’t try.”Ībbey Road engineer Sean Magee shares this perspective. “The critical insights a mastering engineer can give in a conversation with a musician. “Of course, there are many things a mastering engineer will do that we will never be able to do,” admits Justin Evans. All of them agree that the usefulness of cloud-based mastering tools - and their potential to displace human beings - depends to a great extent on your expectations of the mastering process. To try to answer these and other questions, I spoke to Isabel and to several mastering engineers at Abbey Road and other studios, and also to Anssi Uimonen of CloudBounce, and Justin Evans, co-founder of LANDR. Does the rise of automated mastering threaten the jobs of established mastering engineers, including the distinguished team at Abbey Road itself? Which aspects of the mastering process, if any, can successfully be handed over to automated processors? Mastering For The Masses Perhaps the best-known of these is LANDR, which has been making waves for a year or two now, while Abbey Road have gone into partnership with rival service CloudBounce. Online, cloud-based services are springing up which purport to take raw mixes and deliver polished masters without any direct human involvement. The disruptive technology in question here is automated mastering. We want to be a part of this revolution, not have the revolution happen to us!” The last thing we would want is to be fighting an inevitable change. The short answer is: because it is fascinating, and the possibilities are really very exciting. ![]() ‘Why would you do that?’ they ask me all the time. “Some people seem surprised that a facility with lots of traditional mastering engineers, technology and expertise would launch an incubator programme which welcomes technology businesses that potentially disrupt the studio model. Why would the world’s most famous studio promote something that threatens to undermine part of its core business? It’s a question that Isabel Garvey, Managing Director of Abbey Road Studios, is getting used to answering. Even if you decide to pay month to month, those mastering credits roll over, so you can get 36 fully mastered WAVs per year, which is probably more than enough for your average hobbyist.Isabel Garvey is Managing Director of Abbey Road Studios.Īre cloud-based mastering services a threat to traditional mastering engineers, or just a cheap alternative for producers who can’t afford the real thing? It depends who you ask. ![]() Yearly subscribers also get a host of third-party VSTs from companies like Arturia, Audiothing, Cableguys and Baby Audio and get unlimited mastering. For $20 a month, or $150 for the year you get 20 sample credits per month, access to the company's FX suite, its Chromatic sample instrument, DAW streaming and collaboration tools, three WAV masters a month, unlimited MP3 masters and unlimited distribution to services like Spotify and Apple Music. LANDR Studio aims to be an end-to-end solution that can take your musical project through its entire journey from creation to release. LANDR is now bring all of those disparate tools together under one plan that also includes unlimited access to its well-regarded AI-powered mastering service. ![]() If you're a music maker, chances are you've signed up for a music distribution service like DistoKid, maybe you have a subscription to a sample depot like Splice, and even pay monthly for an instrument like Output's Arcade. ![]()
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