- What is eMastered?
- Using eMastered: Free vs. Premium?
- What are the best settings for eMastered?
- Which online mastering service is best? Listen to our mastering demo shootout here.
In our modern era of music making, many artists and producers are creating great, competitive-quality tracks out there.
So, how can aspiring artists and producers aim to stand out and rise above the competition?
The answer put simply, is that the key to a great sound is seeking out a genuinely effective and reliable mastering service.
We also need to find a good mastering service without breaking the bank.
Fortunately, eMastered rises above the modern-day competition for online audio mastering with its affordable price range and music-smart AI designed by Grammy award-winning engineers.
eMastered is a great AI mastering service offering speedy track calculations and effective results.
Its free version can provide all the same custom settings and mastering potential as the very affordable paid subscription, with a limit of two free MP3 downloads of your mastered tracks daily.
The tiered pricing system seems slightly wonky and outdated but can be forgiven considering what you’ll access by signing up for the Premium version.
Its GUI is generally user-friendly but contains a few fiddly windows and sub-headings, which could be laid out in an easier and more welcoming way for the average user.
What is eMastered?
eMastered is an online mastering platform that uses Artificial Intelligence to nearly-instantly master tracks. eMastered compares your mix to a large database of mastered songs in the same style and then applies compression, equalization, stereo width, and more to your track.
eMastered’s massive reference track database allows it to make quick comparisons between genres, which means you can get high-quality results back in a matter of minutes instead of waiting weeks for professional mastering.
Features: 8/10
Original vs. Reference Mastering
eMastered offers two ways to master a track: Original & Reference. Original mastering builds a custom master tailored to the unique features of your track.
It involves simply uploading a single track and using the eMastered AI to apply professional studio processes like EQ, compression, saturation, and more.
With Reference mastering, eMastered will analyze the reference track’s sonic identity and apply the same learning to your own track.
The eMastered AI will instantly match the loudness, balance, compression, and more. Select this option if you want the eMastered AI to replicate the mastering qualities of another track.
Mastering Options
When first uploading a track to the website, there are many mastering options you can select from to achieve a more tapered track master to your style and taste. eMastered offers customization options for compression, equalization, stereo width, volume, and overall mastering intensity.
Presets
Presets allow you to save your favorite mastering options to use these settings on future uploads. Presets can be used to match mastering settings across multiple tracks, to test different settings on the same track quickly, or to keep your favorite mastering settings between sessions.
Pricing: 7/10
eMastered provides a choice between the following payment plans:
- Yearly (billed monthly) at $24 monthly (Cancel anytime).
- Yearly at $14 per month ($168 billed upfront).
- Monthly at $46 per month (Cancel anytime).
If you aren’t sure whether you are going to commit to the service for a whole year, we would suggest selecting the first option (Yearly but billed monthly at $24 per month). This gives you decent value for money while keeping a valid cancellation option available for the 12-month commitment in case you wish to end the subscription prematurely.
eMastered can also be used completely free of charge, with no impact on the way your tracks are mastered.
The only differences between the Free and Premium versions are that the free version can only offer 2 masters per day and are only downloadable as medium-resolution MP3 files.
By contrast, the premium version can offer MP3, WAV, and HD WAV downloads at an unlimited rate.
The HD WAV download setting is fantastic for professional streaming quality, and you can really hear this achievement in all its glory when playing an HD WAV master out of studio monitors or a good car speaker.
Performance Quality: 6/10
With people putting hundreds of dollars into human engineers’ mastering services, it is understandable that manual (i.e., curated by humans) mastering services arguably have a more signature vibe and can perform in a more bespoke way with each creative artist. AI will struggle to replicate this feeling forever.
In the same way that people may visit a tattoo artist – because of a love for their signature artistic style and understanding of each individual client – people may also go to their favorite mastering engineer who performs to a specific taste and reflects this on the records they produce.
Manual masters inject a degree of sonic fullness and authenticity, which carries an emotional weight. Personally, I don’t believe AI mastering will ever be able to achieve this effect – even if eMastered comes up strong in the running for online mastering.
The subtle tweaks in tape saturation, soft distortion, and gain staging that may create signature color with human mastering engineers can, unfortunately, hardly be replicated by an algorithm.
Which is better: Landr or eMastered?
Both AI mastering platforms are easy to use and accessible to the average user. eMastered provides more track customization options, has a more flexible output format selection for mastered tracks, boasts better preview features, and is more affordable – even with its subscription-based pricing plans.
If you’re looking at just mastering a single track as a one-off project or test run, though, Landr is the strongest of the two because it allows you to pay for a single mastered track (eMastered does not).
However, with the fairly costly price of Landr’s mastering service, it’s actually not that much more expensive to get an actual mastering engineer in.
If you’re looking at the most affordable platform out there and don’t mind your masters sounding fairly straightforward in their overall polish and shine, then eMastered is the service for you.
For a proper, in-depth look into the differences between each mastering service, listen to the audio demos below, and read the full report here.
Summary
The first time I used eMastered – starting with the free version – I was pleasantly surprised by the mastered result of my track. It sounded distinctly larger and carried a weightier presence than the original production.
eMastered has limited scope for responsive, creative results and struggles to master your tracks in a way that really taps into the style you want as an individual artist.
This is understandable, considering that would be more like the result of hiring an actual human engineer to master your track.
Overall, eMastered can definitely help you take your mixes to another level. When mastering your track on the platform, expect to receive a bright, professional-quality sound that is polished to a comparable level with most radio-ready songs out there.
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