What is the best free online mastering tool?
Audio mastering is the final stage of the music production process. It involves several technical adjustments and enhancements to the final mix in order to optimize the overall sound quality and consistency. The goal of mastering is to take a final stereo mix and prepare it for distribution, whether that’s for digital formats like streaming services or physical formats like vinyl or CD. Some of the key steps in mastering include equalization, stereo imaging adjustments, dynamic range compression, harmonic enhancement, and maximizing loudness.
Mastering is an important part of releasing music because it helps create a polished, professional, and competitive sound. Mastering can make tracks sound louder, fuller, clearer and more cohesive. It puts the final polish on a mix and makes it ready for commercial release. As digital music pioneer Bob Katz said, “Mastering is the unsung hero of music production, the link between the mixing process and the replication process. An hour of amateur mastering can ruin a year’s worth of recording and mixing efforts.” Source
In today’s music industry, having professionally mastered tracks is essential for getting your music to stand out amongst the competition and be ready for release on streaming platforms or other mediums. Overall, mastering brings the final mix to completion, ensuring tracks have optimal sound quality and commercial loudness levels across all listening formats.
What Mastering Does
According to ForTheRecord, a professional mastering studio, mastering refers to putting the finishing touches on a track by fine-tuning several key elements to prepare it for commercial release. Some of the main things mastering does are:
- Makes the song louder – Mastering involves applying compression, limiting, and other processing tools to boost loudness while maintaining clarity. This creates a finalized version that can compete with commercial tracks in terms of volume.
- Balances elements – The mastering engineer will analyze how different elements like bass, midrange, and high frequencies sit in the mix and make subtle corrective adjustments as needed.
- Unifies the sound – Using EQ, panning, and reverb tools, the sound of all track elements is blended together for maximum cohesion. This makes a track sound polished and professional.
- Optimizes for different platforms – Mastering also prepares a track for playback on different systems like speakers, headphones, and mobile devices. This ensures the best listening experience across contexts.
Overall, mastering glues all the disparate track elements together into a unified, commercially viable sound ready for release and distribution.
Popular Paid Mastering Tools
Some of the most popular paid mastering tools used by audio engineers and producers include:
- Ozone (izotope.com): Ozone is izotope’s flagship mastering suite with plugins for EQ, dynamics, imaging, and loudness.
- Fabfilter Pro-MB (fabfilter.com): Fabfilter Pro-MB is a powerful multiband compressor and limiter for dynamic control during mastering.
- iZotope Nectar (izotope.com): iZotope Nectar features intelligent mastering tools like compressors, saturation, EQ, limiters, and more.
- Waves (waves.com): Waves is known for their analog modeled plugins with many useful for mastering like the L2 limiter, API-550 EQ, and more.
These leading premium tools all offer advanced functionality and high quality processing to take mixes to a professional mastered sound.
Free Mastering Tools
While advanced paid mastering tools like Ozone or WaveLab offer robust control, there are also quality freeware options for budget producers. Popular free mastering plugin options include:
- LANDR – Cloud-based AI mastering with a free tier allowing unlimited 2-track uploads.
- GClip – Hard clipper plugin to boost loudness and prevent intersample peaks.
- Youlean Loudness Meter – Loudness analyzer helping achieve unified perceived volume.
- T-RackS Clipper – Transparent soft-clipping and brickwall limiting.
While lacking some customization compared to paid alternatives, these free tools allow manipulating dynamic range, correcting peaks, and optimizing loudness to achieve quality masters.
LANDR Review
LANDR is a popular and powerful online mastering tool. It is widely used by amateur and professional musicians alike for mastering their tracks.
Some key features include:
- An intuitive interface to upload and master your tracks
- A wide range of customizable mastering presets
- Shared cloud storage for working on collaborations
- Cloud rendering of final masters with file delivery
- Realtime processing and feedback
- Quality mastering algorithms
Pricing starts from as low as $9 per month for hobbyists and goes up for higher subscription tiers with more features and online storage.
The main pros of LANDR include:
- Powerful mastering results
- Very user-friendly interface
- Affordable pricing
- Fast turnaround time for masters
And some potential cons:
- Limited control over mastering settings
- Some concerns with loudness compared to other tools
- Less diversity of mastering styles than a human mastering engineer
- No native DAW/plugin version for processing on your own computer
Overall, LANDR provides a great entry to automated mastering with pleasing results for many musicians especially at its attractive pricing.
GClip Review
GClip is a free mastering limiter VST/AU plugin for digital audio workstations. Developed by GVST, GClip features a basic hard knee limiter to help maximize loudness and prevent clipping. The plugin has a straightforward interface with controls for input, output, threshold, and limiting amount.
Some of the pros for GClip cited are its no-nonsense feature set that provides just the essentials for basic master bus limiting (https://www.kvraudio.com/product/gclip-by-gvst/reviews). It is praised for being lightweight and easy to use, running without oversampling for a more aggressive sound.
However, some criticisms of GClip are that it sacrifices control and finesse for simplicity. The lack of features like soft knee limiting, different limiter modes, and a readout make it hard to dial in subtle levels of compression (
Youlean Loudness Meter Review
Youlean Loudness Meter is an audio plugin that enables precise loudness measurements according to industry standards like EBU R128, ATSC A/85, and other broadcasting specifications. The plugin allows you to measure loudness in real-time as you work through your mix or master.
The free version of Youlean Loudness Meter provides basic loudness metering functionality with one input channel and support for common loudness standards. The Pro version ($69 USD) adds multichannel support with up to 7 input/output channels, real-time average loudness, true peak meters, and an exportable loudness log. Both versions support unlimited instances per session. The plugin also includes oversampling up to 4x which is useful for accurate true peak measurements.
The Youlean Loudness meter plugin interfaces are well designed and offer all the information you need at a glance. The meters are responsive, allowing you to clearly see the impact of any processing changes on your overall loudness. You can hover over the meter to see the short-term LUFS and momentary LUFS levels. Several tools are available that let you customize look-ahead times, oversampling rates, and meter reference levels. The Pro version extends these with features like auto-reset and adjustable meter decay rates.
T-RackS Clipper Review
T-RackS Clipper is a free mastering plugin from IK Multimedia. It provides all the essential mastering tools to shape and enhance the sound of your music. The interface is intuitive and straightforward, with options for input gain, clipping, color saturation, and output gain.
Key features include:
- Input gain control up to 18dB
- Hard and soft clippers to enhance loudness
- Color controls for saturation and warmth
- Output gain control up to 18dB
- Simple and clear interface
As a free plugin, T-RackS Clipper provides excellent value with all the key tools to tighten up and boost the overall sound of your mixes and masters. The controls are easy to use even for beginners. While more advanced mastering engineers may still prefer paid tools with additional options, T-RackS Clipper is hard to beat for a free solution.
Recommendation
The best free online mastering tool depends on your needs and goals:
LANDR is the best option for beginners looking for an easy, automated mastering solution. It provides a simple drag-and-drop interface and uses AI to master tracks based on your selected genre. The results may not be perfect, but LANDR is a great starting point to understand the mastering process.
GClip is the best choice if you want more advanced mastering capabilities without spending money. Its multi-band compressor and brickwall limiter give you precision control over dynamics and loudness. The interface has a learning curve, but is worth mastering for high quality results.
Youlean Loudness Meter is the best tool solely focused on analyzing loudness levels. It’s invaluable for ensuring your masters meet specific loudness standards like LUFS. Pair it with other free tools like compression and EQ to create compliant masters.
T-RackS Clipper gives you professional grade mastering processing in a free plugin. It lacks features of the paid version but provides transparent clipping to boost loudness to competitive levels. Use it as the final stage of your mastering chain.
For the best results, try combining these free tools like using Youlean to check loudness and GClip to process dynamics. With some practice, you can achieve quality masters without spending a dime.
Conclusion
All the free online mastering tools reviewed have their strengths and weaknesses. LANDR is excellent for quickly mastering tracks with presets and offers useful visualization like an interactive waveform. GClip provides precision clipping to maximize loudness with detailed controls. Youlean Loudness Meter is invaluable for analyzing and optimizing loudness levels. And T-RackS Clipper can shape transients and harmonics in masters with its musically-modeled processing.
For those starting out, LANDR and GClip provide easy mastering solutions. But to develop more advanced mastering skills, using tools like Youlean and T-RackS along with spectral analyzers and monitoring on multiple systems is key. The best approach is likely utilizing a combination of these free tools to fit individual needs and the goals for each master.
The key takeaways are: use reference tracks for comparison, don’t over-process masters, check loudness levels, listen on multiple systems, and let your ears guide adjustments rather than just aiming for peak loudness at all costs. Free online tools now make professional quality mastering achievable for all producers.