AI music mastering -- now good enough?

I found this recent article on Ars Technica to be surprising / interesting:

Being purely into music for my own gratification, I’ve never had any mastering done on any of my tracks. But curious if folks who do are finding this to be the trend.

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IMO for those not capable to master for themselves this will be a good opportunity to deliver something compliant with mainstream tracks and that’s okay.

But mastering includes often personality, creativity, and taste of the mastering engineer - much more than a grain only - and may be the only way to get something great and unique.

Just from the past. IIRC the famous sound of ABBA was the secret of their mastering engineer :wink:

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Recently, I did a comparison for a client between my studio mastering and having the same tracks go through AI mastering.

While the AI-assisted masters were not bad at all, my masters won the trial in the end, with four out of five people choosing RI over AI.

My guess is that experienced engineers will realise when not to mess with the sonic qualities of the original mixdown, while AI simply transforms your track into what the model was trained on.

Also, humans make mistakes too, so a question to ask yourself is: which mistakes are easier on your ear?

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Yeah not for me. It’s not like my mastering engineer charges that much, and I think he does a great job, as well as providing feedback, options, etc.

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There is also a difference between studios which do analog masters and digital mastering, both can sound good - but often there is a difference in the analog chain, which is still hard to come by.
There are already some sites which rent analog gear via a web interface - its expensive treatment, and you might still need to know how to use it to its best effect.

I use eq learning from reference tracks to see where i am with my mixes, i found it helpful. So why not see AI mastering as a tool to improve your mix, so you can decide if you want to work on your own mix. (as a furthe referencing possiblity.)

It depends what “good enough” is… for adding some loudness / punch / width to a demo or quick upload to soundcloud, sure, and I would say Ozone has been there for a while now. It’s also great for learning about how to add these things to a master.

When it comes to releasing things more commercially though I feel that individual mastering engineers can impart enough of an individual sound, and to be honest can be cheap enough to use, that saving a few quid using AI isn’t really worth it

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I recently did a series of tests on CD quality masters, and Ozone does a pretty good job. With mastered dance music, however, -3ms is pushing it. Ozone basically cleaned up the low end, made some dynamic EQ adjustments and added some gain. True mastering is in a different league. Hope that helps.

Since AI cannot have “taste” as humans do, and they merely copy patterns, I would say NOT on their own.

However, an experienced sound engineer that can drive the AI toward the sounds he/she wants should be more efficient (fast) than as done today.

It is pretty much the same in all fields really, I think.

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Arent Mixing Programs like Ozone etc with Presets just the same as AI? Your letting the computer do the work for you.

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Ozone is Machine Learning, or a basic AI. I don´t know if you can prompt Ozone…

A mastering engineer will tell you if something in you mix is off and need to be changed before going further. For now, an AI won’t do that.

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It’s machine learning I believe. It’s ok but I think for a mastering workhorse for most artists wavelab elements has better metering and essential digital mastering audio effects. Their presets are well made too.

The bigger value I see is you get to see your metering at a detailed scale which helps you understand what you may have overdone in your mix.

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I’ve generally been unimpressed with Ozone 10 & 11. I’m interested in trying out the logic tool now though after reading that article.

Well - to an extent Ozone and Neutron can point out mix issues at least when it comes to levelling and masking, and they can also make suggestions around saturation, compression, stereo image too. You can provide a reference track and then they can provide some settings to match it which can be a good place to start working from.

Izotope stuff is actually just fairly well featured eq/limiting/compression/stereo imaging (etc) tooling with some useful ways to get starting point suggestions when you give it a reference to compare to. I personally found it pretty useful when starting out and I couldn’t hear things like frequency masking, tonal balance, low end punchiness all that well without references and metering, I don’t really rely on it much now but still use the tonal balance plugin for referencing quite a lot.

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As someone who doesn’t know mastering, and have no professional need for it since I’m a happy amateur, the mastering AI in Logic Pro is absolutely brilliant.

Should I need mastering for professional reasons, I’ll do with this as I do when I need copywriting - I don’t use AI because it’s just not that good.

In fact, unrelated to this, if anything, chatbots are getting worse. It’s like the overexposure of information made them demented or something.

While art’s doing better there, there’s still this AI-sheen over all of it that’s quickly become a very tiresome style of its own.

But yes, this is beside the point. The AI mastering assistant in Logic is great but nowhere near as good as even just a decent engineer doing his thing on a coffee break between higher paying gigs.

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I just slam my mix with Pro-L 2 and no one can criticize it for sounding bad if it makes them go deaf.

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Don’t do it! That AI is going to pocket your music, and use it as a template to write its own and make you irrelevant! :stuck_out_tongue:

Stupid machines.

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But you uploaded it anyways? But i get you - i refuse to talk to chat GPT, because then i train it for free.

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Well, yeah… Not straight to the AI, but I’m sure it’s already been harvested from Soundcloud. :smiley:

But I don’t talk to machines either. I don’t talk to my phone, don’t play games with a headset (still type) :smiley: Don’t use AI based tools (well, on purpose anyway).

I’m all for progress, and once there’s a reliable neural interface, so I can deck into the matrix and hack corporate ice. I’ll grab my Ono Sendai, and strap on the 'trodes! But all this transitional crap I could do without. :smiley:

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Elon is already at the cyber deck, and started human experiments, they can type now with 128 bit interface - saw a Tesla Ad yesterday. Dont know where it will end, but could be Shadowrun /Cypberpunkt terriotorry for sure. (Advances in Biotech - they clearly have dreamt about it.)

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