Bajan Blue
Thanks Eddie
I have to say I did view this with a little su****ion! And pretty much assumed it would perform as you have described - so thanks again, you've saved me the trouble of looking into it!!!
Cheers
Nigel

Hey, I was just revisiting this plugin, since you reminded me I had it ().  I threw it on the master bus of a song I'm working on, and wouldn't you know it ... I liked what it did!  One of the EQ settings ("Clear") seemed to brighten and tighten things up a bit, which suited the mix nicely.  And I didn't get the pumping that I'd noticed before, although I didn't push it that much -- this doesn't seem to be one of those limiters that can get a mix really loud without distorting.
 
Well, just goes to show ya, YMMV.  I doubt this thing will work every time, but like I said, it's probably worth its price.
 
Back to the auto-mastering topic, I wonder if this Landr thing is really much better than choosing a preset in Ozone or something.  I don't call myself a Mastering Engineer (far from it), but I do know that there's a LOT of art involved, which would be very difficult at best to automate.
 
Cheers,
Eddie
 

I gave Bitflipper's track a go as well. Here's what I came up with. I used HMB to master this. I would be interested in anything, good or bad, anyone has to say.
 
BTW Bit. Excellent bit of tunage there. This could easily translate into a Reggae song. The only thing I didn't like was the hand claps. I thought they could either be eliminated or set off to the side and rolled the bottom off a bit more plus a touch of reverb.

Welp...I'll give you a REMIXERS perspective which may or may not help you in any way whatsoever. Any track can be redone in, for all practical purposes, an infinite number of ways. This includes subtle mix changes all the way to full blown remixes that can hardly be recognized by the original composer/artist. Mastering is a way to bring clarity, balance and cohesiveness ...whatever that means to you, to a stereo mix. But with today's technology you can have unprecedented control over said mix. Quite literally the sky is the limit. What's right and what's wrong...what's good and what's better??? Total crapshoot. I imagine what Bit wants is his original track to sound "as good possible"...whatever that might mean. To me it means he wants it to sound good "to him". Fairly subjective, no? I think he's wise to remain delusional and do his own so called "mastering". At least that way he has no one to blame but himself...and no one to take the praise but himself as well.

Really good song, bit!  Liked jan's version, but to me a good song, trumps a great mix or mastering job!

double post.

I could never become a mastering engineer because those people need to stay objective to the material in hand .
Boring if you ask me :-))
All the best
Jan

 I guess I'm of the mind that if a composer, singer, musical performers can be replaced by software, so can a mastering engineer. But I'm not so sure we are to that point yet. I do think that the Landr system may offer a decent alternative for home studio folks with limited mastering tools but so far I'm thinking they can only save you the cost of ozone or other mastering tool.
 
Real cool tune Dave, I had a quick go at ghetto mastering it. Ghetto because of the skill level of the Mastering engineer, me. Nothing ghetto about the tools used though.  https://www.dropbox.com/s...ydr9/Limomst%20wav.wav

Guitarpima
I gave Bitflipper's track a go as well. Here's what I came up with. I used HMB to master this. I would be interested in anything, good or bad, anyone has to say.
 
BTW Bit. Excellent bit of tunage there. This could easily translate into a Reggae song. The only thing I didn't like was the hand claps. I thought they could either be eliminated or set off to the side and rolled the bottom off a bit more plus a touch of reverb.

Cool, I finally get to hear the magical Harrison MixBus. Sounds good. Louder than mine - I'm guessing you used a bus compressor, judging from the compressed dynamics - but still in the sweet range (IMO) and conservative peaks. These images show how you get more loudness without actually changing the average RMS (at the obvious cost of reduced micro-dynamics):

I also hear a little additional brightness. Can I assume that some of that can be attributed to the console emulator? Sounds like you also gave the very low end a little boost.
 
One thing I've picked out to listen to in comparing these masters is the quiet organ and subsequent build-up to the crescendo at the end. Pulling up overall loudness can have the effect of diluting the impact of such risers because the quiet part's less quiet and the loud part maxes out too soon. Yours preserved that dynamic well, I think.
 
Interesting comment about the handclaps. Yeah, they're cheesy (TTS-1) but I'd mixed them low and in time with the snare with the intention of adding texture to the snare rather than being identifiable as handclaps. I'd even forgotten they were in there. When you mentioned them my first thought was "wait a minute...there are handclaps in there?" and had to go look at the project.
 
But since nearly all of the remasters have involved boosting the upper-mids, and the handclaps already had a 4 KHz boost on them, they have consequently become more audible than in the original. To the point where, like you, I no longer like them so much because instead of reinforcing the snare they now stand out on their own. And I absolutely hate that tired old Roland fake-handclap sound!
 
The lesson here is that mastering choices can (and usually do) alter the mix. I think it's a good argument for mixing into a mastering chain even if you don't intend on doing the final mastering yourself.
 
BTW, at 3:47 those same handclaps are heard in reverse, which I thought was a cool effect.

yorolpal
...I think he's wise to remain delusional and do his own so called "mastering". At least that way he has no one to blame but himself...and no one to take the praise but himself as well.

Well said, ol' pal. That's really the gist of it, ain't it?
 
Unlike people such as yourself who spend most of their day trying to please somebody else (i.e. paying clients), for those of us who enjoy the luxury of being primarily hobbyists it's all about self-expression. Being able to say, at the end of the day, "this was made by me".
 
Much more civilized than spray-painting freeway overpasses, I think.

And turning out great music to boot!