Recording - October 2013 - 49

recording mode when it hears input. Also,
all processing, whether done to a single file
or several at once in the Files screen, creates new files with names based on the
original; your source files are never
harmed. Finally, a Help screen explains all
the app’s functions, although it could benefit from proofreading by a native English
speaker...
In use
Audio Mastering Studio runs on the iPad
only; it’s recommended that you use at
least an iPad 2 in order to be sure you
have the processing power to let it do its
work. I tested version 1.4 on a third-generation iPad and an iPad mini, and it worked
fine (although there was occasional buffering when it was paired with processorintensive apps via Audiobus on the mini).
After importing several dozen well-known
tracks—both major-label releases and my
own studio’s output—in MP3, WAV, and
AIFF formats from my music library, I lived
with Audio Mastering Studio for a few
weeks, playing with the tracks and experimenting with the processing.
The app did everything I asked of it,
and did it well; the effects processors
sounded nice and clean, and the processing and export functions worked as advertised. (FLAC output was added during the
review process, a nice option for audio-

conscious users who want to save on disk
space.) There weren’t any nasty artifacts
or glitches unless I pushed the effects to do
things one wouldn’t normally do in mastering software anyway; if you’re boosting
or cutting a band by 6 dB in mastering,
you should probably take a step back!
The Harmonic Saturator could easily be
overused (odd-harmonic saturation gets
old fast), but was good for adding a touch
of life to dull mixes. The Maximizer
allowed for quite a bit of volume boost
without clipping, and the Stereo Imaging
processor let me experiment with, for
example, centering low-frequency content
and adding a bit of width to the highs.
Overall the results were listenable and
easy to get to with the available controls.
Unfortunately, once one gets away from
what the app does, one gets into what it
doesn’t do, and the list of missing functions
one expects from “mastering software” is
pretty long. Just as a quick survey: You
can’t zoom in on the waveform for tight
placement of In and Out points, and there
are no other markers or flags available.
You can’t change the vertical scale of the
display. There are no editing functions at
all beyond setting fades—you can’t cut,
paste, move, duplicate, delete background
noise from pauses, etc. And needless to
say, with only one file accessible at a time,
you can’t work with crossfades, metadata,

or any of the setup one would traditionally
associate with “mastering” an album from
several tracks. The effects sound good, but
they’re fairly simplistic when compared to
what professional audio engineers expect
in a mastering suite; there isn’t even any
multiband dynamics processing.
So, with all of those limitations, is Audio
Mastering Studio not worth the twelve dollars? I’d say it most certainly is. Even if you
can’t do proper album mastering on it, it’s
very handy as a playback tool, with
metering and diagnostics for levels and
frequency response (soloing individual eq
bands to spot particular sources is way
cool), and its ability to import, file-convert,
and export audio files here, there, and
everywhere is very impressive. It’s fun,
easy to use, and I found myself gravitating
to it for everything from checking mixes on
the road to demonstrating the Loudness
Wars at a seminar I was giving.
I do hope that version 2 adds a few of the
features we expect from audio mastering software, but even as it is now, Audio Mastering
Studio is a fine little app... maybe not for prograde mastering per se, but for a host of other
handy audio processing tricks.
Price: $11.99
More from: iMusicAlbum,
audio-mastering-ipad.com

http://www.audio-mastering-ipad.com http://www.cloudmicrophones.com http://www.cloudmicrophones.com

Recording - October 2013

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