LANDR Mastering Plugin

LANDR’s automated mastering service just got better... and it no longer requires a connection to the cloud.

When it comes to AI‑powered audio processing, LANDR were well ahead of the curve. Back in 2014 they released the world’s first automated mastering service, a cloud‑based offering that worked out what processing was required to ‘master’ an uploaded file, and then allowed you to download the result. Naturally, it was greeted with both fascination and fear: LANDR couldn’t possibly do what a skilled mastering engineer could do... could it? And if it could, would it render the mastering profession obsolete? As with pretty much all things AI, the reality was more nuanced than the speculation: it wasn’t the death knell for the mastering profession, but it did do a pretty impressive job of ensuring a mix had a pleasing overall balance, that vocals came across with sufficient clarity, and the stereo spread, dynamics, and loudness were appropriately controlled. In short, if you fed a half‑decent mix into it, LANDR was a quick and pretty consistent way to ‘finalise’ a mix to a better standard than many hobbyists working in home studios could.

LANDR has grown over the years: today, not only do they own VocAlign and Revoice Pro developers Synchro Arts, but agreements with various third parties enable them to offer some impressive subscriptions that include a DAW, a range of sample libraries, video tutorials, plug‑in instruments and effects, and online collaboration and distribution services. They confidently claim that LANDR Studio is “the only subscription you need to create, master and distribute your music” and although some might disagree, it’s not an outlandish claim.

Plug‑in Convenience

For all that, the essential proposition of their mastering service has remained the same — you bounce your stereo mix, upload it and invite LANDR to do its thing, then download the result. Until now, that is! LANDR’s new Mastering Plugin is available for macOS and Windows and supports the AAX, VST3 and AU plug‑in standards. The USP, of course, remains similar: an AI‑powered process analyses various characteristics of a stereo mix, figures out what processing chain might best be used to master it and then applies that processing. But the analysis and referencing is now performed locally and, once the processing is done, the user has far more control both within the plug‑in and more widely in your DAW. For instance, it’s a simple matter to go back to your mix and raise/lower a fader, or revisit a specific instrument’s processing before inviting LANDR to try again. No printing, no uploading or downloading: it’s all much more conveniently integrated into the DAW‑based workflow.

To get started, you insert the plug‑in on a track (LANDR suggest the master stereo bus) and the GUI informs you that you must initiate playback in your DAW. When it detects that playback has started and there’s a signal, it begins its analysis: on‑screen messages suggest that this entails measuring the frequency response, dynamics and stereo width, but judging by the results, I assume several other factors are assessed behind the scenes. Unlike some other AI tools I’ve tried, you don’t have to choose any sort of target profile. In fact, you don’t even need to pigeonhole it into a genre — while messages suggest that it is determining the genre for your track, LANDR tell me that the plug‑in in fact creates an individual ‘target’ profile, based on a comparison of the characteristics of your track with its massive library of references, across all genres. It then creates a ‘signal chain’ to process your mix accordingly.

The plug‑in measures various characteristics of the signal you feed in, before deciding which references to use and what processes to apply.

When done, the GUI changes to show global functions at the top, a large frequency analyser in the middle and, beneath, a set of controls with which the user can refine the result. Placed top centre, a Master button allows you to re‑run the analysis — useful if, for example, if you analysed the wrong section of the song. Top right is a hugely important pair of buttons, Gain Match and Bypass. These make it super easy to compare the original and processed signals. There’s also a useful undo/redo facility. In the centre you can choose between three broad targets: Warm, Balanced and Open. Change this and the plug‑in adjusts its behind‑the‑ scenes signal‑chain settings — useful if, say, your initial mix was a tad brighter than you’d like, since LANDR can then aim for a less prominent high end.

The remainder feels more like a conventional mastering plug‑in, with controls offering enough scope to change things but not so much that it’s easy to screw things up. A simple three‑band EQ (low and high shelves, and a broad mid bell around 400Hz) provides only a gain control for each band. A Presence control seems to be another EQ, this time targeting vocal presence frequencies in the 2.5 to 5 kHz region, while a de‑esser with Frequency and Amount controls can smooth any nasties that result from increasing the Presence.

A Stereo Field slider ranges from Focus to Wide, with the default in the centre position, and seems to adjust the M‑S balance. A Dynamics section offers one‑knob control of Compression, Character and Saturation — these are suck‑and‑see controls really, but I have to say that I very rarely felt a need to change the default settings! Finally, bottom right, are a large Loudness knob and a loudness meter that displays the LUFS and the true peak level, with a peak hold facility.

Testing Time

I used LANDR Mastering Plugin to remaster a couple of projects I’d been working on. To ensure I’d given it a fair run, I also tried it on several other unmastered mixes in a range of genres (from Mike Senior’s Multitrack Download Library), and fed it some commercially mastered tracks, just to see if that might fool it into doing too much!

I was pleasantly surprised by how little LANDR decided to do to material that was already well mixed or mastered. Where I’d already done what I felt needed doing, it did little more than apply gain and make small EQ adjustments. If I’d done less by way of master bus processing or mastering, though, it seemed to make appropriate judgements about things like the overall frequency balance, compression and stereo width. The results always sounded slicker and more polished than the original, except where that would have been inappropriate (eg. a ‘natural’ classical recording).

Importantly, I was still able to tweak to taste, whether by using the onboard controls or other plug‑ins, or by adjusting the mix.

Could I do better myself? Probably, but that’s not the point: it’s taken years to develop my ear and skills, I’d still take longer to do the job and, importantly, the results LANDR offered up never offended my ears — and I was still able to tweak to taste, whether by using the onboard controls or other plug‑ins, or by adjusting the mix and trying again. With all material, I found the EQ and Presence controls useful, usually adjusting for personal taste rather than to correct any perceived ‘problems’. That said, if I felt there was not quite enough ‘edge’ to the initial master (even one without vocals!) a small boost with the Presence control did the trick. These controls also come in very handy if you decide to change the overall target: for example, change from Balanced to Warm, and you’ll inevitably lose top end and probably, along with it, some of the presence in a vocal or ‘bite’ in a lead guitar/synth part. Of course, you can also automate any of these controls in your DAW, and that was sometimes helpful on tracks where there was a strong contrast between verses and choruses.

The result was usually louder than the original, but the loudness was not ridiculous, with rock/pop mixes peaking around ‑8 to ‑9 LUFS (but a lower integrated LUFS!). Indeed, I rarely if ever felt a need to adjust the loudness from the default and, as I mentioned above, the Gain Match facility means loudness won’t skew your perceptions when comparing the result with the unmastered version. The true peaks were a little higher than I’d usually make them myself, measuring ‑0.1dBFS, but as that reading remained the same with a third‑party meter set to 32x oversampling, it shouldn’t pose problems.

There is one potential ‘gotcha’ that’s worth me mentioning — even if it’s really a case of ‘driver error’. LANDR recommend using a fresh instance on the master bus for each job, and if I instantiated the plug‑in using Reaper’s plug‑in browser in the usual way everything worked fine. But I found that if I’d been mastering another song on its own track and then drag‑copied that instance to master another song on another track, it didn’t. On the ‘duplicate’ I could re‑analyse the material, but certain settings were always remembered from the older instance. For example, when using a fresh instance to process a choral Bach track, with strings, woodwinds and harpsichord, the plug‑in did a decent, appropriately light‑touch job. But using a ‘duplicate’ of the plug‑in I’d just used to master a pop‑rock track with bass, drums, acoustic and electric guitar, piano and compressed male vocals, the result was louder, more processed and had a more restricted dynamic range. The input gain remained as on the previous instance, as did my choice of an Open mastering target (whereas the ‘fresh instance’ chose Balance).

LANDR Of Hope & Glory?

All in all, I have to say that I have been hugely impressed by the LANDR Mastering Plugin. It’s quick and easy to use, the results are generally of a very decent quality, and it offers useful tweakability. Unlike the online service, it has the benefit of being integrated into your DAW project, so there’s no faffing around with rendering, uploading and downloading, and you can easily tweak the mix or your bus processing to nudge it towards a slightly better result. I don’t think it’s going to put professional mastering engineers out of a job quite yet, but the margins are getting finer and I don’t think this is really aimed at professional engineers anyway: as with LANDR’s wider subscription offering, it’s intended to offer a solution for the sort of self‑recording, self‑publishing artists and musicians who increasingly need to do everything in an age where they also need to feed the social media PR beast 24/7 — people who often haven’t the time or budget to have everything they put out mastered professionally. For people like that, this plug‑in could be a revelation.