With the explosion of A.I. derived, instant audio mastering services, comes the question 'are they any good?'
Perhaps we should start with the question of 'what is AI derived audio mastering?' Well, to put it simply, it's an artificial intelligence operated, automated, human-free mastering service that claim to use the existing 19 million commercially published, mastered tracks as a reference to master your song in an instant. While I am in no doubt of the future potential of A.I. in a scarily huge amount of applications (many of which we employ already whether we know it or not), in my experience, this has still got a long way to go. Samples I have received in the interests of research, have been overly bright, overly loud (though it's possible to choose non-defined loudness targets) with diminished soundstage and unpleasant digital overtones. Some services require you to add extra info like the style of music, and the aforementioned arbitrary loudness level required. There are now many shootouts on YouTube of people comparing A.I. services to those of a human mastering engineer in his/her acoustically treated analogue studio and the results are telling. Human processed tracks have more 'vibe', attention to detail, clarity, punchiness and an overall vitality that A.I derived masters still cannot replicate. Sure they are cheap but you'd probably do a better job yourself if you bought iZotope's Ozone and used the A.I. options therein.
I'm obviously biased, but if you're serious about your music then you should care about how it presents to the public and have a professional human ear with many years of experience take the last steps with your songs. For now at least, I don't think A.I. mastering is there yet and can make your track sound worse that better.
At least find out what your A.I mastered track will sound like when streaming by visiting https://www.loudnesspenalty.com/
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