If you are reading this, perhaps you are like me.  I have been hearing about Landr’s service offering “instant online mastering” and as an audio engineer I was both pessimistic and curious.

So I decided to try it out, and hear for myself what Landr would do to my tracks.

I uploaded four tracks, of various styles, that were not mastered. And listened to the results of Landr.

The user interface is simple, and it’s free to upload any track and get a preview of what the master would sound like. In real-time, as the track plays, you can go back and forth between unmastered and mastered. Very nice feature.

They encourage the uploading of .wav files (uncompressed).

What I heard in the mastered examples for my tracks was exactly what I expected to hear.   The stereotype of mastering is a louder track, and with hyped high frequencies, and that’s what I have heard in my masters.

I think this website would not be helpful for any audio engineer who knows what mastering should be.   Because if an engineer wants a mastered track that is louder and with boosted high frequencies, they could do those two things (and other things) themselves.

In fairness to Landr their product does deserve a place in today’s audio production landscape.   I would suggest it to a home studio enthusiast, creating tracks on a laptop, who is unfamiliar with how to master a track.  Also, I recommend it for the artist with low distribution (soundcloud.com, etc.)  without the budget to have their track professionally mastered.

I disagree with the website’s claim to be Professional Audio Mastering.   They are accurate, in that a professional is one receiving payment for their service.  But other than that, I don’t believe their claim.    This is not professional mastering.    The process is too predictable, cookie-cutter, and inflexible (even with advanced pricing options).

In terms of pricing, they offer very fair pricing options (for).  They even offer free master .mp3 files with their Free membership package.

These are the opinions of one audio engineer, and I encourage YOU to try out Landr for yourself, and share your findings here.