MixGenuis wins Technovation Award at CMW

MixGenius, a company which provides software to musicians, has won the first ever CMW Music Technovation Award at Canadian Music Week with its first commercial release.

LANDR, an online mastering software and MixGenius’ first automated audio tool, launched on May 5 after seven years of research with a team of musicians, audio and digital engineers and marketers.

The service is aimed at users who have little to no knowledge of mastering and is currently free for mp3 mastering, however there are two paid-subscription tier levels that give musicians access to uncompressed WAV files.

TMN enlisted Henry Gye to review the software:

LANDR takes your raw bounce, squeezes them through algorithms meant to replicate the trained ears of great audio engineers and produces a not half bad MP3 master of what you gave it.

The two subscription levels of LANDR are: ‘Hobbyist’ – which allows the free download of the mastered MP3 that it produces – and “Amateur”, which describes a $9/month fee, unlimited 192kbps MP3s, four uncompressed masters and control of mastering settings. The final level, ‘Pro’, describes unlimited uncompressed masters on top of the ‘Amateur’ deal.

Dominic Morley, an engineer who’s worked with artists like Grinderman, Sting and won a Grammy for Winehouse’s Back to Black told TMN, “’Automated mastering’ does sound very troubling. It suggests that they’ve reduced mastering to ’louder’ and ’all frequencies at equal volume’ […] this being something MG hasn’t been able to completely avoid with their gift to the amateur musician population.”

Usually, if possible, a musician would prefer to pay someone with a human touch and an understanding of how they want their music to sound. MixGenius comments on the issue that immediately comes to mind: Are you going to replace sound and mastering engineers?, saying “The world will always need engineers […] if free mastering sounds this good, imagine what expensive will sound like?”

With that in mind, Morley is cautious. “The difference between a mastering engineer making a record louder, and one knowing which way to steer the sound of your record – and how to do that – is huge,” he told TMN.

Now that this service is available on the production end and streaming on the consumption, the increasing need to have a finished product easily accessed almost instantaneously is starting put a subtle duress on these areas, and likely the industry as a whole.