Soundcloud is now offering a Dolby-based online mastering service, where you give it a recording plus $5.00 and it gives you back a "mastered" version that will supposedly rival the product of a high-priced professional engineer. https://soundcloud.com/you/mastering

As I understand the service, there are 3 areas in which these masters supposedly excel:

1) They should sound awesome, in terms of basic music mixing fundamentals. (This would be my primary concern.)

2) They should play with a consistent sound on all kinds of different hardware – audiophile studio setup, car stereo, phone speaker, etc. (If this really works, it would be great – I'm tired of feeling like I have to listen to everything I do on every device I can play it on.)

3) They should survive uploading to various online services (YouTube, Spotify, etc.) with little modification or "penalties" that affect playback.

Now, this is fun, and there's no doubt the smarts behind this service produce some nice-sounding results. But having given in twice, I can't help but worry about how quickly those fivespots could add up, and question how cogent the "cheaper than a pro" argument really is.

Wondering if others are trying this out.

Last edited by Mark Hayes; 08/12/21 11:22 AM. Reason: Correction: Dolby, not Bose