One of our biggest goals since day one of BandLab is to break down the barriers to creating and sharing your music. Mastering is an important step in the creative process that brings an audio mix to distribution quality. And this step can be costly and inaccessible for many creators. Five years ago, we launched the first version of our algorithmic online audio mastering tool, completely free and unlimited and with no restrictions to the quality of your file downloads.
The world’s leading online mastering service
Fast forward to today and literally millions (more than 5 million a year, to be exact) of mastered tracks later, BandLab’s ground-breaking automated mastering tool gets a brand new look and great new sound. As part of the new releases of BandLab 10.0, we’ve updated our mastering algorithms with the help of multi-platinum, Grammy Award-winning artists and mastering engineers.
The result? BandLab Mastering now has a beautiful new interface, is even faster, and sounds even better.
What is mastering?
Mastering is the final step in audio post-production. The process balances your mix, unifies sonic elements and optimizes playback response for all file formats and devices. This brings it to distribution quality, sounding great on everything from earbuds to monitors. If you’re serious about your creative process, mastering will ensure that your music is presented at its best and is heard the way it’s meant to be heard.
Find out more: What is mastering and why is it important?
Experience the speed
Speed was always important to us with BandLab Mastering, and we’re proud to say it’s now faster than it has ever been. Through both optimization of our proprietary algorithms and impressive web engineering from our Audio Core team, the time it takes to master a track from upload to download has been cut in half.
How do we stack up against the rest? Having run multiple benchmarks across all our different presets – BandLab Mastering is on average 10X faster than the competition!
Easier to use
It’s not all bells and whistles either. You asked, we listened. We’ve reduced the steps it takes to Master a track on BandLab and added new features to improve your experience along the way.
Just as before, all you have to do is drag and drop the track you want to master into the Mastering service. But now there’s also a waveform so you can easily loop a portion of the track to audition it with the different presets available.
With the increase in speed and new server patterns , downloading your track is also a breeze. Downloading a 44.1k 16-Bit WAV file directly from the Mastering service has virtually no wait time. As always, you can optionally save your track to BandLab for easy sharing and multi-format downloads.
New world-class Mastering presets
There are four new Mastering Presets to choose from, each carefully designed in collaboration with multi-platinum, Grammy Award-winning artists and mastering engineers.
Universal: Sound your best through any speaker. Organic dynamic processing and tonal enhancement.
Fire: Stand out from the crowd. Pushed and punchy lows without muted vocals.
Clarity: Let your idea be heard. Pristine breathy highs with light dynamic expansion.
Tape: Aged to perfection. Warm tape saturation with analog dynamic processing.
As always, you can audition every preset on your track to see what sounds best for you.
Only the best for you
We created BandLab Mastering in collaboration with multi-platinum, Grammy Award-winning artists and mastering engineers to ensure that you always sound your best.
To improve the quality Mastering service, we were honoured to be able to conduct a series of deep dive sessions with artists and world-renowned engineers at all stages of their careers. Each participant had a chance to master three tracks created by BandLab users. The settings they created formed the basis of our new algorithms.
Check out the artists and mastering engineers we worked with!
Mike Tucci
Mike Tucci is a multi-platinum and international award-winning mastering engineer and musician. He’s best known for his mastering work with Living Colour, Chris Brown, Young Thug and more.
Justus West
Justus West is a guitar wunderkind who’s played with the likes of Mac Miller, Lalah Hathaway, Alex Isleyis and more. He is also a two-time Grammy-nominated producer to some proper legends, having worked with Alicia Keys, Mustard and Ariana Grande.
Maria Elisa Ayerbe
Maria Elisa Ayerbe is an audio engineer for Grammy and Latin Grammy-nominated albums. She has more than 13 years of experience in recording, mixing, music production and audio post-production. She has worked with artists like Mary J Blige, Ricky Martin, Jennifer Lopez and more. Here’s what she had to say about BandLab Mastering:
“I can totally see any singer or songwriter using this type of service. Somebody who’s just recorded themselves and are looking to come up with a really good demo. It’s just a very limited amount of instruments, but it’s a raw type of thing that needs to sound very wide and broad. Yeah, I can totally see somebody looking for a quick master using BandLab’s Mastering!”
Mandy Parnell
Mandy Parnell is a Grammy-nominated audio mastering engineer and founder of Black Saloon Studios in London. She has mastered for the likes of Aphex Twin, The XX, Bjork, Brian Eno and many more. Here’s what she had to say about BandLab Mastering:
“So, wow! You guys just got the most craziest thing going on. I love it!”
Will Quinnel
Will Quinnel is a Grammy-nominated audio mastering engineer who has worked with artists like Kevin Devine, Nelly Furtado, Lupe Fiasco and many more.
No subscriptions, no limits, 100% free
As an essential part of our core services to empower creators around the world, all BandLab Mastering features are 100% free. BandLab Mastering is the only truly free online Mastering service in the world. There are no subscriptions, no paywalls and no cap on the number of tracks you can master or limits to the quality of the tracks you can download. We want you to focus on the thing that matters the most – your music.
Go ahead and give the brand new BandLab Mastering a try! From demos for collaborators to distribution-ready releases, there’s never been a better time to release music to the world. Be sure to give us a shout out when you’re on stage receiving your Grammy!
Read more: Welcome the all-new BandLab 10.0
