Landr - online mastering?

[janglesoul]

Stumbled upon a site called http://www.landr.com yesterday. They offer online "robot" mastering for quite a cheap price. No idea how good. Just wondered if anybody has tried it?

Apparently it's free to master mp3:s. So that would be way to try it out for free, I suppose. For Wav-file mastering you pay monthly for a limited/unlimited number of tracks.


EDIT:
Googled a little bit more and apparently it's been around a few months and a lot of people are highly critical/amused at what Landr claims themselves capable. Still interesting to see if its better than no mastering at all

[jetson]

Hmmm...I use Logic, and it has a pile of mastering templates for various genres. I'm sure the other DAW's are similar. Strikes me that this may just be a "pick your genre" approach, and then a template is applied. I haven't used it, so I could be wrong, but that type of mastering can be both good and bad.

It's all quite subjective in the end. Sounds weird to me to even think of mastering an MP3?

[l i f]

I've tried it out a few times - you upload a .wav and get a machine-mastered mp3 for free or pay to subscribe for .wav masters back. A few weeks ago they claimed new algorithms pitched toward electronic music even... but anyways, they give tips on getting the most out of their templates, lots of headroom etc, but at the end of the day it's all in the mix. If you have gone so far as to record and mix music yourself, it's not much of a stretch to learn the basics of mastering using the same equipment.

More specifically on LandR, I've tried it a couple of times and have been less-than-impressed - seems to whack a bit of compression on and provide that "air" everyone talks about, which really just means too much treble, imo. I'm far from convinced.. probably works fine for cookie-cutter-pop that fits the bell-curve of their data. My sampler-based music is proudly lo-fi and the acoustic improvisation I've sample-mastered using LandR (woodwinds and percussion) has too much dynamic-range to handle any kind of compression (kills the room-sound).