Tapsearch Com EditorAutomatic mastering: The way of the future
March 17th 2007 19:10
Anyone who's done home recording knows how much of a pain the mastering process -- taking a final recording and tweaking it to sound loud, clear and polished -- is. You run the mix through loads of compressors, reverbs, equalizers, etc., and half the time it makes it worse.
But so much of mastering is objective: You want to get the mix to a specific loudness, with a specific frequency balance, depending on the style. Awhile back I had the idea that someone should program an automatic mastering application. Load the WAV in, tell it what style to master to, and it spits out a roughly professional-sounding mix.
I finally got around to Googling it yesterday, and it seems a few companies are doing it. I tried out AAMS, which worked out OK.
How it works is, you load in two WAVs -- one of your mix, one of a professional recording you want it to sound like. (Don't use the internal converters; make CDs WAVs in iTunes.) It analyzes both files, converts them to a special format and adds various effects to your mix to make it sound like the professional one.
I used my mix of "Blood on the Water" (I blogged about it here, and my original master is still up at my MySpace page) and matched it to Lamb of God's "Laid to Rest." I have to say I was impressed with the results; it churned out a master with a lot more low end than my own had.
A few significant problems, though. Again, the internal MP3-WAV converter is garbage, or at the very least malfunctioned when I tried to use it. Also, the interface looks quite primitive, and when you master, the status bar goes from 0 to 100 with each effect added without saying so. At first I thought the program was in some sort of infinite loop, because it kept doing the same thing without accomplishing much.
Also, it's just plain difficult to use. Ideally, you could click the two files, and it would take them and do whatever's necessary. I had to mess around with everything, putting files in different formats (WAV works best) and eventually just going through all the menus and dropping them into the program's own "source" and "reference" folders. (My Computer, Local Disk, Program Files, AAMS, AAMS Files.) Maybe there's an easier way.
Finally, the master did not match the reference recording in volume at all. I fixed this easily enough by running it through the (awesome) Classic Master Limiter a couple times, but they should really work on that. You can adjust each effect yourself -- though my philosophy is, if I wanted to to that I'd do all the mastering myself -- and maybe if I buy the full version I'll mess around with it.
All considered, it's inexpensive (less than $100), with a free trial you can use for 50 effects applications (each mastering uses 7 or so). As more companies catch on to this, it could really make amateur mastering a pretty painless process.
By Robert VerBruggen
But so much of mastering is objective: You want to get the mix to a specific loudness, with a specific frequency balance, depending on the style. Awhile back I had the idea that someone should program an automatic mastering application. Load the WAV in, tell it what style to master to, and it spits out a roughly professional-sounding mix.
I finally got around to Googling it yesterday, and it seems a few companies are doing it. I tried out AAMS, which worked out OK.
How it works is, you load in two WAVs -- one of your mix, one of a professional recording you want it to sound like. (Don't use the internal converters; make CDs WAVs in iTunes.) It analyzes both files, converts them to a special format and adds various effects to your mix to make it sound like the professional one.
I used my mix of "Blood on the Water" (I blogged about it here, and my original master is still up at my MySpace page) and matched it to Lamb of God's "Laid to Rest." I have to say I was impressed with the results; it churned out a master with a lot more low end than my own had.
A few significant problems, though. Again, the internal MP3-WAV converter is garbage, or at the very least malfunctioned when I tried to use it. Also, the interface looks quite primitive, and when you master, the status bar goes from 0 to 100 with each effect added without saying so. At first I thought the program was in some sort of infinite loop, because it kept doing the same thing without accomplishing much.
Also, it's just plain difficult to use. Ideally, you could click the two files, and it would take them and do whatever's necessary. I had to mess around with everything, putting files in different formats (WAV works best) and eventually just going through all the menus and dropping them into the program's own "source" and "reference" folders. (My Computer, Local Disk, Program Files, AAMS, AAMS Files.) Maybe there's an easier way.
Finally, the master did not match the reference recording in volume at all. I fixed this easily enough by running it through the (awesome) Classic Master Limiter a couple times, but they should really work on that. You can adjust each effect yourself -- though my philosophy is, if I wanted to to that I'd do all the mastering myself -- and maybe if I buy the full version I'll mess around with it.
All considered, it's inexpensive (less than $100), with a free trial you can use for 50 effects applications (each mastering uses 7 or so). As more companies catch on to this, it could really make amateur mastering a pretty painless process.
By Robert VerBruggen
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