It involves human perception, as music is not just rhythm, harmony, but mostly important – Emotions. Real Mastering Engineer working in the studio in listening room can add to the mastering music hers or his own perception of the sound, focus on emotions in the music, something which is not possible to measure in any scientific way.

The computer/automatic software plugin doing Instant Mastering, cannot discern jazz music from reggae. As per simple example, human will do it in the few seconds, and will apply processing audio which relates to the specific genre. With reggae it will be focus on the bass, where with jazz song – focus on fidelity and clarity and smoothness. The machine will apply processing according to the 0s and 1s inside the file. This is crucial point when machine simply cannot compete with skilled engineer.

In this service, entire process is done automatically by the computer. Your music is analyzed by algorithm and AI apply certain type of processing to the audio file. The focus of above service is to make the mix/audio file extremely loud. This is actually very incorrect to call that process AUDIO MASTERING (Audio Mastering is a more complicated chain of processes). There is no doubt about that type of service is very convenient (as done entirely via Internet and automatically – therefore your “Master” is done in next 10 min or so. Easy to order, very fast and very cheap. For audio engineering amateurs – it could be great thing to try their first time, but for anyone considering their work seriously – definitively not.

If you spend weeks and months recording, and mixing your album, it’s your baby, would you give it away to some automatic plugin or rather use experience, skills and knowledge of professional sound engineer?

First and most important part of Audio Mastering is to carefully listening to the music.

After initial listening, mastering engineer takes notes and decides what processing need to be applied.

Editing: Very important part where all small issues, like crackles, clicks, other digital gizmos should be spotted and removed.

Feedback to Mix Engineer: Improving the mix.

Processing Audio: Analog and Digital. The crucial thing is not to aim for LOUDNESS only like INSTANT/AUTOMATIC SERVICES do, but for fidelity, quality, musicality, good balance.

Authorization and final delivery in specified format (ddp, vinyl premaster, MFiT, high resolution, etc).

When you use Instant/Automatic Mastering services, nobody listens to your music in specially treated room with high end, full range monitoring system. There is no 20-30 years of experience of listening of tens of thousands records in any music genre, experience which has a great impact on the final outcome. With automatic service, there is also lack of communication between mastering engineer and client – something which is crucial, discussing project, explaining, and listening to the client’s requirement. This process alone can bring massive positive outcome on final project.

When you send your mix to four different master engineers you will get four different masters, and none of them is “better” or “worse”, as there is no definition for ideal master. Communicating with mastering engineer has massive impact for the final outcome, as client is the person who decides about it not the mastering engineer. Upon personal request, mastering engineer creates audio master per client, per his/her personal requirements. It does make certain difference when you deal with a mastering engineer, a human being, adding something additional from himself to the project, an extra which machine is not able to provide. Each and every mastering engineer will deliver different sounding masters, every person adds some of his/her own “personality” to the music. It is a value which cannot be overestimated.