There's been a lot of talk about MixGenius's LANDR online mastering service over the past year, so it was almost inevitable that we'd see a rival platform emerge at some point. Now it's here in the form of MasteringBOX, a new web-based drag 'n' drop platform that promises to give you a finished master in "less than a minute".
The MasteringBOX team is said to comprise "a group of professional sound engineers with years of experience". As with LANDR, you can sign up for a Free account (this enables you to download 320kbps MP3 masters), and there's also a Pro account option that gives you up to five CD-quality 16-bit/44.1kHz masters for €9 a month. Pro Unlimited, meanwhile, gives you unlimited uncompressed masters at €19 a month.
Although the service is automated, MasteringBOX does give you a degree of control over how your master will sound. All account holders can set their own Loudness level (making it theoretically easy to achieve the same level of loudness for a collection of tracks), while Pro and Pro Unlimited subscribers also have a 3-band EQ to tweak.
"We know mastering can be tough to understand, and it has a slow learning curve," says MasteringBOX founder Dídac Corbí. "We are music enthusiasts ourselves and want to help other musicians by making the production process easier. This is why we created MasteringBOX, the result of years of work and research in the field."
Of course, automated services such as this one are unlikely to put mastering engineers out of work - even the press releases states that MasteringBOX "may not quite achieve the same balanced and smooth sound that a talented mastering engineer can achieve with fine-tuned adjustments in a suitably-equipped professional mastering studio" - but it's good to see some competition emerging in this particular market.
You can find out more, try the platform for yourself and sign up for an account on the MasteringBOX website.
