Can you use a hand saw to cut wood? Yes, 100%. Can you use a stone to bang in one nail? Yes, 100%. OK. Next step... You are a professional framer. Your full time job is framing houses. The construction industry has competition and everyone charges an hourly rate. Your competition has an on-site lumber mill, multiple circular saws, nail guns and a crane. You have a stone and a hand saw. Can you do professional framing? No. You will go out of business and/or nobody will hire you. Does this mean you now cannot cut wood or bang in nails? No, you can still do those things. But do you have a job? Are you actually a professional framer? No. Now swap hand saw and stone with Ableton.
@@APMastering your comparison is so flawed. Absolutely Laughable. Ableton is much more than a stone a saw. You're actually trolling and I was gonna make a response video and bring this up in streams but I don't think so now.
@@APMastering I see your point and I agree, but I think a more fair comparison would be like someone using Festool brand tools vs someone using Wen tools. Will the Festool be faster and more efficient, sure, but it's not to say the Wen tools can't get the job done just as well or in a reasonable amount of time. Ableton does a lot of things much faster than reaper or cubase, like routing to external gear, parallel processing, clip editing, and general program navigation. Miss me with all those damn pop up windows in reaper specifically. Maybe you can use an elgato to run hot key combinations or work around that with code, or even do what I do with midi and a launchpad, but I haven't delved in deep enough to test that. Admittingly, Ableton probably has one of the weakest bounce down processes considering the whole thing is basically frozen if your bouncing stems with master bus processing, and I see how that alone can take it out of the conversation for professionals, but I guess I didn't consider your first video's purpose to only highlight professional mastering work. This one, sure, that's what you're detailing, but I don't think Ableton is incapable of doing efficient and quality mastering work if needed. Maybe not full time, you're right. Either way, Ableton is cool and a lot more powerful than a stone and hand saw, metaphorically of course. I learn a lot from your videos and I appreciate the effort you put to respond and debate your audience! I also agree with most of your takes, genuinely. I'm happy to see how quickly your channel is growing and I hope you stick with it for the foreseeable future! Cheers!
@@Tallstreehouse thanks. to be clear, i'm not hating on ableton. i gave it A tier. i just don't think it's a good choice specifically for pro mastering IMHO
@@APMastering I really like your content, but your points here are mostly valid for professional (paid) work: for an average user, who only wants his/her own track to be published via Distrokid this hardcore work optimizations are pretty much overkill: ua-cam.com/video/STbBhsqpD4k/v-deo.html
I totally agree that people who are not mastering engineers generally will not need any of these advanced features. But if you are not a mastering engineer I don't understand why you will be trying to do mastering. If you are just putting a limiter on your song to get it louder then this is fine but that's not what mastering is.
@APMastering "But if you are not a mastering engineer I don't understand why you will be trying to do mastering. If you are just putting a limiter on your song to get it louder then this is fine but that's not what mastering is." Electronic music and in the box production blurred the line in between songwriter, producer, mixing engineer and mastering engineer in the last few decades. I don't think, there's a problem if someone tries to do everything on their own. They just want to sound "professional". If Reaper, a 40$ DAW is sufficient for mastering, and it can be done with plugins, they can assume, that it is something that is relying on human skills. They want to get these skills. I don't see the problem with that. On the other hand, a mastering engineer nowadays is considered to be the human mixgoodizer in the minds of most people. No one seems to remember the original purpose of mastering anymore (it was a technical thing: preparing sound for specific media), which was really an engineering process, that required knowledge and one being prepared in what to do.
I mix and master for my living full-time and do it all inside Ableton Live and have done so for 10 years. I work on a few hundred songs per year (masters, stem masters, mixes). Absolutely can be done, very fast too.
That's just like saying Reason is just as good as Ableton for live electronic music performance which is false . Reason in its own right for example, sounds better than most DAWs but has its limits in terms of workflow and rendering. Ableton has much better workflow, but just like comparing it's mastering features to reaper's it's no win either plain and simple.
@@Jbmkzx The only thing I am doing is refuting the title of the video ("Cant do mastering"...) which is completely false (I have a done a lot in my career to back this up). Also, I am of the school that does not believe one DAW sounds better than some others unless proven. I am only interested in facts and not hearsay in audio stuff.
@@APMastering I master, stem master, and mix+master for my living, all inside Ableton. There are zero issues. High-profile clients too, e.g., I’ve been John Summit’s audio engineer since 2017 so most of his discography has gone thru my DAW.
I saw the automatic stereo file render in real time. That shut me up with my shitty ableton. I mean, you can't even drag and drop basic audio files if you don't press the alt button. wth..
@@ranajoyshil i wouldn't say ableton is over rated at all. it's a great program with a lot of features many programs literally don't have, you can get endless tools with max4live that you can't get on any other program and it's a creativity beast. my daw experience is reasons, logic pro and cubase and i much prefer ableton over any of the others
Who said ableton was for mastering? it is by far the best daw for electronic music production, and infinitely expandable with max for live. It has a very different DNA than the rest of the daws (except bitwig which is made by ex ableton employees)
I'm blown away by the avant garde interior decorating here. A couple of records propped up on plywood boards against the wall. Construction tools on the table for that added touch.
I initially was hearing "You can't achieve a professional sounding master with Ableton etc" but clearly your point is more "You can not make mastering music your job without a certain level of efficiency that DAWs made with production in mind simply aren't gonna offer" which is a much more agreeable argument and one i was fully convinced of before even getting to the end of the video! So all in all this is a rather informative video.
so a more honest title for the video would've been "I can't do my kind of professional Mastering in Ableton, Reason, Bitwig etc…". i wonder why you didn't go for that one.
@@Kane_O_307 no. I know some engineers who use wavelab and when they get stems they have to use cubase or something to mix that down and then bounce it out again into wavelab. IMHO that workflow is outdated and I will get superior results, quicker, than engineers who do that. Engineers who use soundblade, sadie, pyramix etc are just using outdated legacy nonsense and again I can work quicker and more effectively in reaper.
This things you are complaining about sounn like some that can be easily achieved with some analytical vst that that u see L / R Channel. You should get into max for live find your likeminded people, you can make any effect or setup in max for live and it keep getting better. its an integration. for a generation. Maybe u make the community better. The guys over at ableton keep improving there software and they listen more than ever. but i can see allot of your points coming from your perspective. Maybe Ableton dont want to expand that way, and let other software makers dominate in the Master category. have you tried the luna daw? is it good for mastering?
I recently rated Ableton live as A tier, mostly because of Max. I actually have a full license for Max/MSP and did my university dissertation using it many years ago. But everything you are saying here has zero to do with mastering.
@@APMastering i mean, the batch render, and all the work Flows. I dont remember allt he things. But in my mind, i was like, if you like ableton, you could make scripts for the things thats missing. Maybe u have allready tried. If mastering is all u do, it makes sense using a software that has features for it. I totally see that. One of the Worst things with ableton live is that u cant drag new audio files from arrangement view into file system in a clean way. People who make drum kits and shit got to render every sound. It should be drag and drop.
I do video game audio professionally and this debate about Reaper has been going on for absolutely ages and became a meme in the community. I, personally, absolutely cannot imagine doing my work in any other DAW just because how efficient, feature proof and expandable Reaper is. Wildcard rendering (naming by folders, items, item numbers, etc. etc), regions, markers, subprojects for very very complex in game systems which need multiple layers ( could probably be an improvement in your workflow for stem mastering, check it out). Additionally there are countless scripts. If you are aware of the things that take a long time and can be systemised - you can just easily customise it or pay someone to write you a script. Hell, there is an official Wwise integration script for Reaper. Again, I am speaking from my own perspective as a sound designer, where batch rendering 50 assets with proper naming is pretty much a daily chore. And that chore would make me want to kill myself if I had to use Ableton or Bitwig, even though I do sometimes write music in those DAWs, because quite honestly Reaper is a bit painful for creative music production. What kills me is that people just ignore the efficiency part and write it off as not important and something to look past. This is literally one of the most important, if not the most important part in day to day work, as it not only speeds up itteration times quite drastically but also keeps you sane and just that tad further from your eventual mental breakdown 🤣 P.S. Most people I know work in Reaper, some work in Nuendo, and a small small minority works in Ableton
exactly, wild card rendering is non negotiable. i actually use a wild card in this video but for mastering i don't need that many, for exporting stems for live performance i use more
TLDR: you can master individual tracks in DAWs like ableton and bitwig, but try to do anything beyond that and you’ll end up wasting time and losing money.
@@vjmcgovern You would if you approached it trying to replicate how you would do in old school linear DAWs like Reaper but the power of especially Bitwig is you are not resteicted by linear workflows. I use Reaper for multichannel work but Bitwig for Stereo and multitrack.
YOU can’t, literally thousands of others do. Perhaps you like some features or workflow of one, but it doesn’t make the work of the majority of the industry disappear 🤣 what a take.
I can do mastering in any DAW but I wouldn't because it's idiotic to lose so much money because I don't want to use a $60 program where the free demo never runs out
@@Joe90Production he detailed that efficiency of workflow is essential to be able to master 1000 songs per year. Some with multiple versions or edits, some with vinyl masters separate from their CD or streaming service masters, etc. Why can I make perfect sense of his take but some people have some much trouble? You can probably ‘master’ a single track in audacity. Doesn’t mean it’s viable for full time use
If you have watched the full video he says why you can't. He doesn't say it's physically impossible, he says that it will just take you more time and effort for the same result.
In Studio One you can store different versions of a song in the same file and recall them. Then you can have a project page linked to each song and master each of them separately, and if you change the mix, you can update project page. You can also export Stems in Studio One automatically.
I've been mastering for over 20 years and have stuck with WaveLab. I had no idea Reaper was so capable though! Still, I'm doing a few DDP images a year and it doesn't appear Reaper can do that as readily.
Sincere question: if I've mastered songs for "large"/Grammy-nominated artists in Ableton, workflow aside, are they not professionally mastered? I liked this vid, not trying to be flippant at all, always learning 20 years in... I do this for a living, appreciate everyone's perspective. Cheers, C.
@APMastering Pardon my french, but that sounds like bullshit IMO. What defines professionality is the way you handle yourself with clients and the achievements you have under your belt with those clients. If you've earned a Grammy and proved yourself in the industry, then your workflow is professional no matter what anyone else says. In a lot of ways, if your workflow is what helped inform your decisions when working on those award-winning albums, then that workflow is an aspect of your artistic expression. Whenever you work on something as a mixing or mastering engineer, you leave a part of yourself in that song's sound. The fact that your workflow works for you (and in a lot of cases only you) and not everyone means you've carved out and refined your taste and style.
No, I can't do all of this in Ableton. You can do alot of the stem stuff though using clips as regions and groups. It's easy to print the aux tracks, and freezing>flatten and consolidate automatically save wavs of the track with the original track name so it's pretty stupid fast. Loop back is always on screen so I can bounce the stems or the multitracks of a song with and without effects and print effects separately as quickly as the song plays start to finish. I think most things you'd need to be streamlined, you can set up with a midi controller, midi to keystroke program and a good template. I don't do enough mastering for this to ever be much of a thought, but I'm also in the camp of people who think mastering is overcomplicated by those who do it for a living in order to keep the job relevant. I feel like a standardized eq curve controlled by MB compression, saturation, limiting, mid/side processing and volume automation pretty much does the trick for most stereo track mastering jobs. All the heavy lifting and dynamics control is done in mixing in my case. I'm open to discussion on this topic but after 6 years doing this stuff, if found that to be my conclusion.
making the music is 10x faster in ableton. I and if you just release like 90% of the rest of the world directly from any daw without any formal mastering then the mastering format he is talking about here from 2 decades ago isn't even necessary for that.
Look up the original definition of mastering- it has evolved and changed so much that the current job description is impossible to pin down outside of the fact that they’re creating the “master” file. The truth remains that most amateurs think mastering will take care of mixing mistakes when in fact they simply need to hire a more qualified mixing engineer, which is why a good mastering engineer will send the song back to be properly mixed when necessary. The formats required just for film/TV alone are crazy because of what they want to do with songs these days. Looping sections, removing elements, etc Just because you see “stem” doesn’t mean it needs to be “mixed” - but you’d have to be in that industry to know what’s actually being done. No shade, of course 👍
@@thisaintart 100%. when people send 100 stems, I just sum them until I hear a problem. and if it sounds like nonsense, I ask to hear their working mix. if that sounds bad, I reject it with feedback. that's an important part of my job, QC. I'm not going to spontaneously start mixing stuff.
I think the main issue nowadays is agreeing on what mastering is to begin with, because the hobbyist crowd is so large. The majority of the online space is amateurs who are throwing up one track at a time on UA-cam or streaming. For this use case, you can master in any DAW, because then you're just dealing with one stereo file. But a pro who is working on a whole album, and doesn't always have the luxury of only receiving stereo mixes, needs to be able to adapt to different situations on the fly, alongside dealing with multiple revisions and client requests. And that is where Reaper shines, because of how flexible it is, while not charging an arm and a leg for being dedicated mastering software. To me what was interesting was your touching on numerous features of Reaper that I have never used, despite having worked on some EPs with some local bands. I found out I could have saved myself a load of time with these things. Time to get back to discovering even more features in Reaper. It's crazy how deep it goes.
At the end of the day the only thing that matters is the way it sounds and that the client is happy. I asked a sincere question and was met with a nonsense non-answer. It appears you do not appreciate constructive criticism either, calling some commenters trolls. Play stupid games (clickbait) win stupid prizes. In my experience those that talk about stuff online all day and always need to be right, which is essentially the premise of your entire channel, are just making noise instead of actually trying to be helpful. Why don't you share a reel of your work? Or is that a troll-ish request?
The best part about this video is that it teaches what mastering actually is on a fundamental level, compared to what is usually perceived as "mastering" by more inexperienced audio people (slapping a compressor, eq and limiter on the master track and exporting "1.wav")
@@APMastering There needs to be a distinction made between pro mastering vs. mastering only for streaming. If you know your music will never be pressed to CD or especially vinyl, and if you're a social media artist whose audience is listening on their phones, then Ozone does a pretty good job. I know a few pros who use it for this purpose. One guy also likes using a few of Ozone's modules within his larger mastering chain. But if we take the limited definition of mastering as that last step in the process where you are trying to enhance a stereo mix, then Ozone is an option. It's not the best at anything, but it is a decent jack of all trades, if a user actually bothered to learn each module and learnt to tweak them properly. And again, it comes back to "what is mastering". It probably doesn't help that mastering is not always the same process for every song, just as mixing changes for every song. If people could understand that alone, then they would understand why mastering isn't just throwing on Ozone on the stereo mix (though that could be one option). And it also comes down to taste. In some cases, clients like the Ozone master, and if that's the case, so be it.
@@whaleguy mastering isnt enhancing the mix necessarily. if your audience listens with phone speakers then there's no reason to bother much about sound quality
I have a very simple idea that can put this to rest. Mastering battle. You do you, I do Ableton, blind test on UA-cam, let the results do the talking. It would be fun, informative, and I will win ;)
@@APMastering what a cop out. You literally made a clickbait video and got called out and asked to put your money where your mouth is. You say "you cannot master professionally in Ableton." I said yes you can and offered a simple challenge and you declined. That is cowardly and basically makes your entire video pointless.
I would also add a stopwatch to the challenge. How long did it take to get the results. APM seems to put a lot of emphasis on that here. Let us all see whether overcomplicating the process is really faster.
Mastering is about sound, not about superficial workflow tricks that don't matter once the audio is ultimately bounced. I thought this video would be about different DAWs and their summing engines, you know, sound. Instead, it's really just a thinly veiled reaper advert. Lol
mastering is about sound, but getting paid adequately for what you are doing requires very efficient workflow that has nothing to do with sound. I don't use reaper and i master only if i really have to, but i agree 100% on what he says in the video.
@@SamueleForteBefore the advent of the DAW, mastering was done with none of these comforts and conveniences. With this in mind, everything he points out is once again superficial.
The point about process ergonomics is fair, and large scale projects such as multiple revisions would be beyond tedious to master with the workflows that some DAWs are designed around. That being said, I didn't particularily appreciate the gish gallop of ostensibly ever increasing complexity, when all we honestly are talking about is growing number of tracks fed into different subgroups. I still think the conclusion of the video is somewhat disingenuous. I mean, "if you can't do a full album with multiple song revisions that are essentially 100+ tracks multitracks each, then you can't do mastering on your DAW". The point you are trying to drive home can be paraphrased as "I am a professional and I have seen all these things that you probably haven't, so don't you ever dare to think you are mastering unless you are doing a full album with multiple revisions in one go, like me." Gatekeeping much? I didn't bother watching all the way through since I doubt the argument got any refined towards the end, but hope you also threw quad and ATMOS mixes in there, you know, for good measure.
I think that is an extremely uncharitable interpretation of my video. I'm discussing using DAWs to do professional mastering. So yes, if you can't do stem mastering for complex projects then you are incompetent at that job and are not pro level. gatekeeping? no. just reality.
@@APMastering the video title states that we can't do mastering in our DAW which is not true at all. You should rename the title to "this is why your DAW is not optimized for professional multi clients mastering"
when I say "do mastering", I mean use it to do the tasks of a mastering engineer. like I say at the start of the video, if you think mastering consists of slapping ozone or whatever on your song, then you are speaking about something else. for me that is not doing mastering.
@@APMastering well your interpretation of it is wrong mastering is enhancing a mix so that it can translate the vision of the artist on many systems. You don't need Reaper to do this.
Thinking about it a bit more, it seems obvious that professional mixing and mastering engineers would want very different things out of their DAWs than producers, diy artists or just people who are more hobbyists. For me personally the "best DAW" is the one that i'm the most inspired to work with and gets in my way the least. E.g. I care a lot about stock instruments, which probably don't matter at all to engineers. So talking about the original tier list video, that might be a criticism of the concept. I would want to ask questions like: "Is reaper a better tool for professional engineers than logic for diy artists?"
exactly, that was a big limitation of the original video and the original was just really my subjective opinion from my perspective. I think people took it all a bit too seriously relative to my original intention for it just to be a fun tier video
As a studio one user I can fill you in a bit on the S1 mastering capabilities: it can do most things that you showed are good about reaper, but NOT when stem-mastering. The mastering (project page) and mixing (song page) are very seperate and you have to bounce things and can then automatically import them to a project. This is a great workflow for people who master their own music, but it would definitely slow you down a lot when mastering professionaly, because you'd always have to create songs first with the stems and then bounce them and go back and bounce again if you want to adjust something in the stems. But as a solo guy you probably have those project already anyways from producing and mixing
exactly. this is the same workflow that I have an issue with concerning wavelab. Some mastering engineers who I am friends with use wavelab and when they get stems they have to mix them in a separate step and then import them into wavelab. the problem with this is, when I'm mastering an album, I will often go back and forth tweaking the stems constantly in small amounts, going back and forth between the different tracks on the album. Anyone who is stuck in the stereo only, one song at a time, old school mastering workflow, is just wasting time in the studio IMHO.
@@shaferproducergod yeah sure, but then you'll be missing many features listed in the video or accessible in the S1 project page. It's possible but not ideal
Point 1. You can do that on Ableton. Press CMD while dropping all the tracks on the arrangement and automatically the DAW will overlap all of them vertically. Making them automatically aligned and ready for reproduction.
I think what you're missing here, in a "forest for the trees" situation, is that *you should not* master your own work, in a perfect world. Someone with the skillset can master your work in any daw just fine, because they are a degree removed from any attachment biases, they are given criteria and they promise they can achieve the goal of the process. As far as someone who releases tracks sporadically, one here and there, it becomes irrelevant how they are mastered, just that they sound great. Because in that scenario, the classical definition of mastering is already lost. The next best definition is that the track sounds great, and sounds great when flanked by other musical projects in similar vein, so that they can share playlists easily. If the mastering is done in a way that is obtuse to the consensus they can not easily share time within the same playlist, for most people and most scenarios. Mastering in modern times has reached a point where it's pretty far removed from the prior three phases it went through. Technical mastering-by-measurement in the early days, adding artistic and project-solidifying mastering of the past 60 years, and finally modern technical mastering on a per-song basis. There is a consensus of what is expected, and mastering should bring the work in-line with that consensus. As an artist and engineer myself, the practice of allowing others to master a multi-song project is highly advisable. It does not matter what tool they use to do so, just that the resultant product is up to the expectations of the client, which likely includes technical requirements and mastering artistry, and/or as promised to the client. So YOU can't master YOUR OWN WORK in Live, Bitwig, etc. But if you want the best possible outcome, someone else surely can. Cheers and good luck with the channel!
thanks. I feel like if you are just increasing the loudness of your own music to be in line with other stuff in a playlist, this does not constitute mastering. At least that is not what I mean when I use the term mastering. Not if a professional mastering engineer is using Ableton or something, I would be able to speed up their productivity significantly and save them literally hundreds of hours of studio time per a year by mentoring them in reaper. It probably might be realistic to double literally their income. The difference would be that radical. I think that would be grounds to say that you can't use Ableton if you are serious. that would just be insane.
You sir, are a legend. Thanks for sharing the honest and real information about your job and the industry. I'm a live engineer and it can be frustrating knowing certain facts about gear/concepts that are generally misconceived as a whole.
Hey, I’m a little confused as to why you say you “can’t” master in Ableton (or Logic). Revisions and album mastering is perfectly possible in Ableton. DAWs today are so similar that if you can’t do your job in it, it’s more of a workflow problem. In my eyes, if the client is happy, you’ve done a good job. I’m sure a lot of other engineers would agree.
Awesome video, as someone doing mastering in reaper too, I'd love to be able to see how to set up all the stuff you've talked about in this video. I really need to speed up my workflow, and find a way to get Uber efficient 🤔
I produce, mix and master in Bitwig. I have a templates for each sessions. I find Bitwig to be the easiest and have the fastest workflow of all the DAW’s I’ve been trying. However I never do Stem mastering, but I could setup a template for that too. Bitwig has a great section for writing down ideas and notes. I do think that you develop a workflow that suits you with the DAW you’re working with. ❤️
More rage baiting, but lets actually summarize what I learned from your DAW tier video. It seems clear that you’re a fan of Reaper, which is perfectly fine, but it’s important to acknowledge that your evaluations may reflect personal biases rather than a balanced, professional analysis. It appears that you may not actively use all the DAWs you’re rating, and assumptions about their capabilities-particularly if based on limited or outdated experience-can misrepresent their current functionality in 2024. This is a common issue among content creators, as confirmation bias and clicks often influences opinions. While it’s natural to have preferences, it’s problematic when those preferences are framed as objective assessments under the guise of professionalism. Love for a particular DAW, such as Reaper, is valid, but presenting that enthusiasm as an impartial review can lead to misleading conclusions. In other words if you're going talk the talk show us that you walk the walk. Put Reaper up against the current versions of Studio One, Logic or even Cubase as an all around DAW and let's see what happens. Use objective categories such as price, features, Interface, usability content etc... and then we can have a conversation. Simply saying no one mixes and masters in FL studio is not just disingenuous it's actually not true.
I agree that I am not an expert in all of the DAWs I ranked but if I were to be an expert in all of them, I'd need to buy all of them and use them working on many projects. Nobody can reasonably do this with 17 different DAWs. It was just my subjective opinion. Not sure why everyone is so outraged that I gave my opinion on DAWs.
@@APMastering I’m not outraged, but I prefer opinions grounded in real-world experience and practical usage. As someone who owns and actively uses seven different DAWs, I find most of these ranking videos to be a disservice to the community. While I’m not a mastering engineer and wouldn’t presume to argue with a professional about their craft, it’s equally unproductive to rank tools without actually using them or providing an informed, professional perspective. That approach reflects a certain blind fanaticism rather than constructive information. Just FYI
A shout-out to Samplitude from me. That's what I use for both CD, tape and vinyl mastering. It's the little brother of Sequoia. I wouldn't use Samplitude to make beats though. Sure you can do it, but that's where I think Studio One, Ableton or FL Studio might be a more convenient choice.
You can master in most in daws. Workflow is personal. You can turn a bolt with a ratchet or a spanner, both achieve the final result, just different workflow.
Great video. I didn't realize Reaper could handle those complex tasks so well. I finally sold on it, and will be checking out the demo in the near future when time allows. It would be awesome for you to make a video on how to setup Reaper for mastering sessions, especially related to rendering and revision workflows (preferences, settings, etc too). Thanks!
Just remember to take your time to actually "learn" Reaper and to explore its possibilities. the learning curve may seem to be tough but I guarantee it is so worth it!
@@APMasteringin the end I think you can argue about what is more important, efficiency vs an end result that sounds good. There are many efficient and fast restaurants out there yet they all do not make the most delicious food. Some chefs might make very delicious food and the craft is slow and thoughtful yet the restaurant visitors don’t worry about it because the food there is unique and tastes better than in other restaurants! This does not make the chef less of a professional, just a chef that values the end result more than saving time on certain parts of the process. I just think its a matter of defining the term ”professional” here! Just my five cents:)
Yeah! I’d say pro is efficient enough and good. Then you can always optimize certain things to save some more time. You could do a study in this, how much time do professional mastering engineers use on each respective part of the process, and practically testing each processes in a daw with a timer, using the daw as efficiently as you can. There could be something for us all to learn there! Would be interesting to see
I can do all that with ableton: -it has static time markers, I can make a template set with them 100ms apart. I do have to drop each file onto the corresponding marker, but that takes a minute or two. -again, you can make custom template sets. I have templates for singles vs albums, templates for various genres & mastering styles -I just use whatever is easiest for the client in terms of note taking 🤷♂️ sometimes apple stickies, sometimes google drive, sometimes I just send a copy paste of my notes along with the files in the email… they don’t need to be integrated into the project file imho; though that is a COOL feature. -I don’t master with my eyes, so I don’t need to *see* the non-destructive stereo sum of all the stems or songs. I just need to know the stems are all being summed to the master channel or if multiple stem songs in same project, that their respective stems are all being summed on their buss channels. I can minimize tracks in ableton so it doesn’t look cluttered with abuncha stems. If I really want to *see* the stereo sum, I can use resampling in Ableton. Don’t have to bounce out, don’t have to leave ableton at all, just add a new audio track, set to resampling input, it’s rendering out of the master channel, takes a min or two. I can’t say that would be non-destructive… but again, I don’t have to do that at all! I don’t master with my eyes. I just work on the master chain (final chain in ableton) & minimize the stems. Or if I have multiple songs in stem form in an album project file, I can buss the stems of each song and just work on that buss. Using grouping or return tracks (I use returns). And then I have a full album chain on that master channel that applies to all songs. -if they want the WHOLE album a half dB louder… I wouldn’t have to redo my fades or start over with that final process… if it’s an album project, I’m just going to tweak my sequential compressors or limiters on the final chain that’s applied to the whole album… if it’s a single, uhm, bumping it up a half dB is fairly painless, and doesn’t require redoing fades & such? Maybe the disconnect here is that I don’t really do vinyl mastering? -working with multiple revisions & consolidating/importing individual tracks from other revisions is easy, don’t have to leave ableton or even go to finder/file manager. I can open a project from ableton sidebar, view all the buss tracks & individual tracks in the sidebar, even preview them; and then drop in whatever I want into the current project from the other revision just like dropping a sample in) -Yes, Ableton Suite and my M4 Pro Mac Mini can absolutely handle a gapless stem album with 200-300 tracks. And I can make it not look like a clusterfuck with collapsing tracks, color coding, etc. -when I use dithering (on non-streaming masters for live/club use), I use ozone’s dithering, not ableton. Imho ozone has better dithering. Correct me if wrong. -I use fabfilter, izotope, but mostly antelope DSP+FPGA AFX highly accurate analog emulations (much more true to analog than universal audio bs). I only work in ableton for the automation, panning, stem control, etc etc. Features that all daws have. -also, say I have an album of songs in stem form all in one project, and each song has all their stems feeding into a buss return track, and each buss track/complete song feeds into a master chain where my final album glue chain is… I can tell ableton to export each of the buss tracks individually but rendering them all at once in one batch… with each one rendering out of the master chain seperately… my file names & fades & etc will be retained and they’ll export as individual tracks out of the final master “glue chain”.
i dont use these, but wouldnt pro tools and nuendo be the right tools, eg when you also have to deal with atmos? for my own little projekt i used studio one for the mastering job (with exported mixes from ableton) because it has a fast lufs measurement, wavelab also has some nice batch tools. reaper is very flexible and you can setup and program many things, but dont this consume too much time? and do you do all your mastering in the box? I also use 2 Hardware tools, because its much quicker to get the right results with them than with plugins.
Reaper has a really steep learning curve because of how feature rich and customizable it is. It's not friendly to the newcomer by any means, but it can do things no other DAW can.
This confirms absolutely something I’ve felt for a good while. Learn multiple DAWs for different purposes. I use Ableton primarily and have for years. Recently I’ve picked up more with Pro Tools and Logic, and always had the latter two as ideal for separate mixdown processes. Making EDM, I lived by the idea of a track being mixed down so well that the master just needs a limiter. But I deal with other genres too, and IMO that concept just does not work for things outside of EDM.
@@FPAudioLabs my folder structure is definitely setup correctly. If it is the default do you know where I can find the setting for it? I can't find anything on the internet and in my preferences there's only on or off for the folder waveform display (stacked and not summed). I'm on 7.26
9:37 if you could do a tutorial on how you are doing this multiple render with the markers and stuff that would be amazing. It indeed looks to be an optimal way to render out a batch of beats or tracks. *edit* figured it out pretty quick, i didn't get the LUFs overviews on export. VERY useful though.
I think a cool video idea for the future would be breaking down misconceptions about what mastering even is, because a lot of people including myself might be confused as to what "mastering" really is because alot of people just equate it to, like you said, making the audio sound clear and loud on whatever the listener is using whether it be ipods or nice speakers or shitty speakers for that matter. Also would love to hear before and after of what you can do with sounds.
Now since I'm still not exactly sure what the difference between stems and tracks are and yes, I do know what tracks are, but. What the hell exactly are stems? As for mastering, I don't do it. I don't have the ears to do it properly. ALl I do is try to get the best mix that I possibly can and then I send the tracks off to get mastered. I'm running Cubase 13 Pro and although i think I could master with it, why not get someone who's better to do it?
The workflow issue works both ways. Ableton/Bitwig etc are optimized for different stages of making music - i.e in both cases sound design and idea generation - with a lot of built in facilities for juggling multiple ideas and so on.
@@APMastering many people do. its cheaper and the tools to learn ho are online. unless we are talking about live bands and stuff. but most electronic music is mastered by the original artist
@3:00 do you use Reaper Subprojects for your stems? Also you didn't cover Meta Data which is what I also think is important for a mastering house to be able to provide...Reaper also does that too.
@@APMastering ??? Metadata is crucial for digital distribution, copyright tracking, royalty payments, and ensuring that listeners and platforms can accurately identify your music. but I'd like to see your take on it.
Professionally, effectiveness wins. Again we are talking mastering, not composing a tune. If you're a bedroom musician doing one track a year, in which case your journey (from start to finish) and focus is quite different, yes your fav DAW will do.
I do agree with this lad. I've been a electronic music producer for like forever. It's pretty common that you do all in a row, if you are serious you take a night break between mixing and master and don't produce the whole song in one sitting (which is btw pretty common as well) but those are arguable professional studios and rather in another room in their flat. looking to tracks produced professional we are looking at tracks from swifty, dre j balvin and so on. and no they are recorded and mastered in a different setting usually. (and as always - yes there are exceptions but the general take is like that)
versatile compressor is the latest version which was significantly overhauled from the original apcomp prototype. the code is so different that i called it a different thing
I love Reaper, its mindset and its feature-orientation, and I'm currently learning to use it. However, despite that, the argument at 11:09 doesn't hold much water when you point out the fact that Reaper lacks *extremely* basic features for a DAW for making music in, namely instruments. Reaper doesn't come with even a drum machine. It could entirely excel in regards to producing recorded music, but saying that it has a "learning curve" when it comes to music-making omits the fact that you absolutely *must need* external instruments to use the program. It's incomplete. It assumes the user will have their own instruments, as opposed to more music-making oriented DAWs which have far, far superior stock plugin and sample libraries, and you can actually produce entire songs in without having a single piece of gear or downloading a single VST. This doesn't negate the mastering opinion (the title is a bit controversial but I guess that's what gets clicks), but it is a half-hearted defense in that regard, in my eyes.
just download reapack and then you have access to a whole bunch of plugins, for example the tucan studios plugins, instantly for free. reaper is more of a DAW you use when you bring your own specific stuff to it rather than trying to be a playground of premade stuff. in terms of sample libraries, I've never used other people's sounds to make my music so not sure about that.
@@APMastering lol no we must have been typing at the same time. No, the “reaper doesn’t even have a drum machine” argument above is rubbish. Reaper costs $60. Go buy what you need with the money you save over ableton or whatever and there’s also tons of free stuff out there.
Depends on what you’re trying to do. Are you handling ISRCs/metadata? The “Pro Tools” of mastering has been Wavelab, although clearly outdated. You’ve also got Nuendo, Reaper, Sequoia, Pryamix, Sound Forge Pro, Acoustica, Soundblade, SawStudio, etc.
exactly. there are many choices which people use for mastering. IMHO all of them are dumb apart from reaper and nuendo/cubase and maybe DP but I need to use the latest version to confirm DP.
It seems to me like you just enjoy Reaper's workflow most and you have some good reasons to feel like that, but Bitwig surely has great workflows for mastering as well. I wouldn't want group tracks to show the sum of the waveforms of its tracks for example, because that changes anyway when you start to add any effects to the tracks. you have to load an oscilloscope to see the correct waveform, as that effect can update itself constantly. Also looking at waveforms is only part of the job, isn't it? It's mostly about the resulting sound, especially nowadays with automatic gain matching on listening platforms. It doesn't matter anymore what the waveform looks like, unless it suffers from dc offset. Bitwig starts to shine when you wanna add parallel processing to your effect chain, which is always a great way to make things subtle and no other DAW even approximates Bitwig's superior routing workflow.
reaper can not only do parallel stuff but theoretically dozens of parallel signal chains per track. i think bitwig is great but it needs some more features like i lay out in this video. if you could at least do batch rendering it would be better for mastering but as it is, it's not possible to work at a high level for mastering with zero batch rendering for example, that's just an absolute nightmare for professional work
Mastering is all about playback of sound on multiple systems, you got to get your room and monitoring system sorted and create a flat room where you can tell the difference between levels on different media, instantly, our ears are analog, we are analog, therefore you need to address that to its full potential before you get into DAW, your next step is to find the DA and then AD converter that will help enhance your monitoring system. Cubase is a very strong DAW, because it is very transparent, lastly I will say you should NeVer bounce all your tracks into a stereo master channel, there is some facts with mathematics you need to understand and then you will hear the difference, Great video on many aspects, Good Luck!
to be fair the better the mix the less focus will be on mastering with ableton there are max 4 live plug ins which eliminate a ton of the issues you are finding with it. examples would be a notepad there are ways to get around these things another point is it depends on what you are doing, if i am producing music i'll have projects and finished songs where each time i am going to be exporting a single audio file to be mastered and same goes for EPs/albums, i'll always be finishing a song then rendering out of that single project so a lot of what you're saying wouldn't really be issues i have reaper as i use it when creating sound design for video etc, never looked into it as a mastering specific program. i will have to give it a go and see how it goes for mastering projects. good video and thanks for giving reaper some love, i told a lot of people to use this as a sound design specific program as it's use with video editing built in is amazing.
Ah, so the DAWs listed aren't good for 'professional mastering and music production' I see. I could see how people may take the title/thumbnail and rush to comment without actually knowing what the video says Needless to say I agree honestly. Different DAWs serve different purposes and some do things better, it's just the way it is If someone's like me and just produces music for fun then concerning themselves with workflow efficiency and other things would probably just be a secondary issue, but I could totally see how this changes the moment that your income in a career is depending upon stuff like that. Like I use Fl Studio and I just do some very very basic mastering and that's it, but again, that's purely because music to me is just a silly hobby, not a *professional* job. Really informative video, nice!
your list made sense to me apart from cubase thats def A. i wanted to disagree about mastering but ive never mastered someone elses album so im not totally sure if i would feel like something was missing. ableton is still my pick because i think its best for production
Ultimately, the only thing that matters in mastering is results. You can achieve the same results mastering in Ableton, Reaper and many other DAWs. Although you may not have access to certain workflow capabilities useful for 'professional mastering' in certain DAWs, It doesn't make the result any less valuable. I am content with mastering in FL Studio for now, and would never switch to other software unless I felt I was missing something I needed, and I really don't expect that to happen anytime soon, considering the same results are possible almost universally among popular DAWs. I can see why people like Reaper but that doesn't make any other DAW less valid for mastering.
@@DM3-Music not when time & money matters in a specialist area.. ..... thats why there are solutions out there for mastering... He explain it very well.. Ableton, Reason etc. are not tools designed for that amount of workload & that is okay.
@@sebbosebbo9794I should maybe have been clearer; I was including time in 'results'. I agree that some daws are not optimal for mastering but my point is that they can still achieve what's necessary. I agree with his point that maybe some choices of DAW are unwise, especially if mastering as a career. Money does of course matter but I didn't think it was that important to mention, as it doesn't really relate much to the point I was making; It's not that other DAWs cant be used for mastering (as stated in the video title), It's that they might not be the most efficient choice.
OP... disagree. the thing that matters in any profession is your ability to make money. high quality results allow you to earn more and efficiency does too. do it for the love of music and not for money makes you a hobbyist and then you are not refuting my position that you can't do pro mastering in aböeton
@@APMastering Realistically everyone in pretty much every profession chooses their job and the way they do it based on a middle ground between Ability to make money, Efficiency/using the minimum amount of effort possible, Convenience, and how much they enjoy it. Not all professional mastering engineers use the exact same workflow, because there isn't one that's objectively best. There will always be some amount of personal preference about how you do your job, especially with something as subjective as mastering. There is no 'correct' answer to how to master professionally, so you can't say that anything with which it's possible to achieve professional results is invalid. You're basically saying 'this way is correct and your way is wrong because it seems too suboptimal for me'. The actual process is the only part that doesn't matter to a client, unless they have a specific reason to favour a specific method when they're not even doing the mastering, you are.
Hello Sir. Been using R for just a year or two, still a beginner. Would you kindly share, what expansion packs let you set up the file drop process where regions are created automatically and the files land in the window as a cascade? This was impressive. I’d love to have that! Thank you for sharing!
Reaper is such a killer DAW. Since I made the switch in 2012, every time I have to work in another DAW because of a project I feel stuck, they are all so slow to move through. I have professionally worked on Pro Tools, Cubase, Ableton Live, Sonar, Cool Edit Pro, Wavelab, Ardour and Soundforge. From 2004 to 2012 I was totally unpleased with DAW's, they all felt so slow, then I tested Reaper and it just felt easy. But it's ugly-ish and for the tech mind, artsy people may never get it, other DAW's are kinda prettier.
@@Mansardian I say I use it for 12 years everyday and your conclusion was that I didn't changed themes enough hahahahahaha holy sheet! Power to the people, they say.
I wonder how all those old heads using only outboard gear with little to no presets, or markers even function without being able to view all the stems as one stereo waveform on the fly like you mentioned reaper lets you do. They must either not value their time or get a lot of clients if they're working like that right?!... wait a sec. 🤔Could it possibly just be different strokes for different folks and that people are able to just as good of a result given enough time of them learning a certain process to accomplish the task effectively. To your analogy with the nail gun construction company thing that you pinned in the comments, what about the folks that can build houses in Japan with no nails, nothing but joinery and simple hand tools in just about the same amount of time as a lot of proper non cardboard houses get built in the west. How about the fact that their houses are able to stand the test of time, or hell even brick layers and how quickly they can get a job done building a whole church that will still be around for a hundred years. You just don't get that same result when all you can focus on is corner cutting processes that a lot of big contractors do to save time and effort. They really only do that because that's their end goal, minimize cost, maximize profits. Sure I get it was just an analogy but I imagine its really more relatable to how anyone can pick up and shoot a gun relatively accurate even most kids, but not just anyone can simply pick up a bow and shoot an arrow. No matter how good of a shot you are you just simply cant curve a bullet around an obstacle that's in your way, but when put your time in its not really difficult to curve an arrow, its just how arrows work. This doesnt mean that by default guns are just "better" that's really subjective opinion and down to a lot of factors. Maybe some people aren't living in a world that whether its an arrow or a bullet matters, all they need is something they can get an acceptable result from a process they know how to do best. It's not always about the money in business, especially in the world of art. Usually its well understood that limitations breed creativity and creativity is the soul that makes people's art unique.
This seems like the difference in VFX between amateurs using Adobe After Effects at home or for small freelance projects vs something like Autodesk Flame, which is geared towards efficiency and imediacy because operators are dealing with clients face to face where time is money and you need your shit to work NOW and be rock solid. People here commenting how XYZ app can do that. Sure maybe to some extent, but HOW does it do it when you are operating in a real-life commercial production environment, not your bedroom?
@tristen_grant I do really basic stuff (Ableton User) - I make 90s style hip-hop loops with a bit of sampling, and have my turntable as input source and scratch over the beats, or I do live-looping. I use like 0.1% of the features - and it works perfectly and it's so easy to do. E.g. I double click a drum-rack "instrument", it automatically makes a new midi channel, then i drag a sampler onto a drum-rack pad, drag 100 kick samples onto the sampler, right click the selection/zones and distribute em, right click to map to a macro knob, and another klick to map it to my midi controller - and within 30 seconds I change samples on-the-fly by just turning a knob. Reaper or any other daw probably can do this too "somehow" - but i would need to really dig deep and read the manual. This is where Ableton shines.
@ its easily possible though when wearing my mix engineer hat i work faster in ableton. wavelabs hierarchy of tracks and processing is incredibly flexible (each track can contain up to 7 lanes of clips that can be processed further individually or collectively) and it is way more consistent and smarter w lower-cpu allocation with processing and rendering. in addition the plethora of robust organizing (structurally and metadata) with wide delivery and encoding support makes getting started and done with projects a breeze. i def agree on right tool for jobs and comfortability is a factor but for me reaper seems like more of a headache than just using a dedicated tool for the post processing and delivery systems i expect
love the metaphor of screwdriver, drill and a drill driver. its like yeah you can screw stuff with ableton, but drilling with screwdriver is going to screw things up. pun intended.
I use my DAW for recording and ITB *desk* mixing (I use outboard for 98% of my source material and 95% of my fx). I've been using Logic (7, 8, 9) for almost 20 years and recently switched to Reaper for certain tasks/projects. I still love Logic for creating and mixing individual tracks, but I agree, that for client work the workflow in Reaper is next level. I have yet to incorporate Reaper into my own productions, mainly because I use very old tech (2 x Apogee Ensemble (total 16 i/0), SSL Duende DSP) and can't afford the same quality ADDA and DSP for recording and OOB processing with my new(er) Mac. Also, I can work super fast on individual tracks in Logic, using the SSL Duende DSP to mix. I know all the shortcuts, plus I LOVE editing in Logic 9, more than any other DAW. MIDI implementation is not great in Reaper, but as alluded to, mixing and mastering + automation is superb in Reaper.
I can pretty much do that in pro tools. I also use reason and you are correct, reason is great for producing and maybe mixing, but I always finish in pro tools. I already set up my busses to be steams. Example vocals, leads, drums, percussion, brass etc. Then they all feed into the master buss. I can print them and import them into a new seesion for mastering and run the same principle you explained here
sure you imagine you are doing it professionally and you have an album of this. manually sitting here and exporting them to stereo and importing to make the album master is slow and unprofessional in 2024 compared to keeping it accessible but collapsed like in reaper or some other DAWs
Who just sends a bunch of stems without the stereo master why would you need to consolidate all the stems to view the full mix when they should be sending the stems in a folder and their own final master track in a separate? I don't get your initial work process . If you are mastering stems you can create any kind of template for most daws and have it loaded ready to go . Then it's a case of adding the VSTs and whatever fx to each track you want . Unless you are using fruity loops then most other DAWs are very similar . Ableton and Logic can do same stuff but Logic is a fk on takes like 3 extra steps to just be able to manipulate a bit of audio .
Minus the automated rendering of individual songs from time marker to time marker, you can (and I have) done all of this in FL Studio. The only annoying part was the individual rendering. EDIT: this was with stereo mixes, though if you keep stems to strict instrument/vocal groupings, the stem mastering bit remains doable in FL Studio. The number of stems has to be reasonable, otherwise it's more of a "multitrack" than "stem" mastering
The best DAW is the one that make you more comfortable and more efficient with your workflow. If for mastering is Reaper it's ok. By the way I don't think Ableton ever was the prof. studio standard DAW. Maybe Pro tools or Cubase. But I can't think of a reason why an artist who masters only his own tracks can't do it with Ableton?
Can you use a hand saw to cut wood?
Yes, 100%. Can you use a stone to bang in one nail?
Yes, 100%.
OK. Next step...
You are a professional framer.
Your full time job is framing houses.
The construction industry has competition and everyone charges an hourly rate.
Your competition has an on-site lumber mill, multiple circular saws, nail guns and a crane.
You have a stone and a hand saw.
Can you do professional framing?
No. You will go out of business and/or nobody will hire you.
Does this mean you now cannot cut wood or bang in nails?
No, you can still do those things.
But do you have a job? Are you actually a professional framer?
No.
Now swap hand saw and stone with Ableton.
@@APMastering your comparison is so flawed. Absolutely Laughable. Ableton is much more than a stone a saw. You're actually trolling and I was gonna make a response video and bring this up in streams but I don't think so now.
@@APMastering I see your point and I agree, but I think a more fair comparison would be like someone using Festool brand tools vs someone using Wen tools. Will the Festool be faster and more efficient, sure, but it's not to say the Wen tools can't get the job done just as well or in a reasonable amount of time. Ableton does a lot of things much faster than reaper or cubase, like routing to external gear, parallel processing, clip editing, and general program navigation. Miss me with all those damn pop up windows in reaper specifically. Maybe you can use an elgato to run hot key combinations or work around that with code, or even do what I do with midi and a launchpad, but I haven't delved in deep enough to test that.
Admittingly, Ableton probably has one of the weakest bounce down processes considering the whole thing is basically frozen if your bouncing stems with master bus processing, and I see how that alone can take it out of the conversation for professionals, but I guess I didn't consider your first video's purpose to only highlight professional mastering work. This one, sure, that's what you're detailing, but I don't think Ableton is incapable of doing efficient and quality mastering work if needed. Maybe not full time, you're right. Either way, Ableton is cool and a lot more powerful than a stone and hand saw, metaphorically of course.
I learn a lot from your videos and I appreciate the effort you put to respond and debate your audience! I also agree with most of your takes, genuinely. I'm happy to see how quickly your channel is growing and I hope you stick with it for the foreseeable future! Cheers!
@@Tallstreehouse thanks. to be clear, i'm not hating on ableton. i gave it A tier. i just don't think it's a good choice specifically for pro mastering IMHO
@@APMastering after reading your points, I suppose I don't either 😂😅
A lie of omission is still a lie, but get dem clicks tho because you're also not wrong
it looks like, with each video it gets colder and colder in your room.
yeah man I just through together a desk and a mic in my unheated attic space. you can literally see your breath in here.
@@APMastering I really like your content, but your points here are mostly valid for professional (paid) work: for an average user, who only wants his/her own track to be published via Distrokid this hardcore work optimizations are pretty much overkill: ua-cam.com/video/STbBhsqpD4k/v-deo.html
I totally agree that people who are not mastering engineers generally will not need any of these advanced features. But if you are not a mastering engineer I don't understand why you will be trying to do mastering. If you are just putting a limiter on your song to get it louder then this is fine but that's not what mastering is.
@APMastering "But if you are not a mastering engineer I don't understand why you will be trying to do mastering. If you are just putting a limiter on your song to get it louder then this is fine but that's not what mastering is."
Electronic music and in the box production blurred the line in between songwriter, producer, mixing engineer and mastering engineer in the last few decades. I don't think, there's a problem if someone tries to do everything on their own. They just want to sound "professional". If Reaper, a 40$ DAW is sufficient for mastering, and it can be done with plugins, they can assume, that it is something that is relying on human skills. They want to get these skills. I don't see the problem with that.
On the other hand, a mastering engineer nowadays is considered to be the human mixgoodizer in the minds of most people. No one seems to remember the original purpose of mastering anymore (it was a technical thing: preparing sound for specific media), which was really an engineering process, that required knowledge and one being prepared in what to do.
@@9b0 a lot of my work is in QC. AKA rejecting mixes.
I mix and master for my living full-time and do it all inside Ableton Live and have done so for 10 years.
I work on a few hundred songs per year (masters, stem masters, mixes).
Absolutely can be done, very fast too.
@@fanusamurai facts. And to one of the highest known levels in electronic music like a true G!
That's just like saying Reason is just as good as Ableton for live electronic music performance which is false . Reason in its own right for example, sounds better than most DAWs but has its limits in terms of workflow and rendering. Ableton has much better workflow, but just like comparing it's mastering features to reaper's it's no win either plain and simple.
@@Jbmkzx The only thing I am doing is refuting the title of the video ("Cant do mastering"...) which is completely false (I have a done a lot in my career to back this up).
Also, I am of the school that does not believe one DAW sounds better than some others unless proven.
I am only interested in facts and not hearsay in audio stuff.
VERY interested to see you do stem album mastering in ableton with a demanding client
@@APMastering I master, stem master, and mix+master for my living, all inside Ableton.
There are zero issues.
High-profile clients too, e.g., I’ve been John Summit’s audio engineer since 2017 so most of his discography has gone thru my DAW.
Was going to disagree in Ableton's favor, then you showed Reaper's workflow and everything got a little quiet around here lol
I saw the automatic stereo file render in real time. That shut me up with my shitty ableton. I mean, you can't even drag and drop basic audio files if you don't press the alt button. wth..
Same experience here
Ableton was my first proper daw and yeah it's good, but it's as overrated as pro tools but in the producer world.
@@ranajoyshil i wouldn't say ableton is over rated at all. it's a great program with a lot of features many programs literally don't have, you can get endless tools with max4live that you can't get on any other program and it's a creativity beast. my daw experience is reasons, logic pro and cubase and i much prefer ableton over any of the others
Who said ableton was for mastering? it is by far the best daw for electronic music production, and infinitely expandable with max for live. It has a very different DNA than the rest of the daws (except bitwig which is made by ex ableton employees)
I'm blown away by the avant garde interior decorating here. A couple of records propped up on plywood boards against the wall. Construction tools on the table for that added touch.
the woodworking theme is signaling some up coming content :-)
I was gonna say 😂
@@mattclark7825 helps with his masters having boards up against the walls , more warmth
Immediately tells you whom you're dealing with 😅
I initially was hearing "You can't achieve a professional sounding master with Ableton etc" but clearly your point is more "You can not make mastering music your job without a certain level of efficiency that DAWs made with production in mind simply aren't gonna offer" which is a much more agreeable argument and one i was fully convinced of before even getting to the end of the video! So all in all this is a rather informative video.
thanks! you're exactly right. i think many people read the title and commented before watching
@APMastering ofc you wont use that title though. Youll use some click bait title instead...
so a more honest title for the video would've been "I can't do my kind of professional Mastering in Ableton, Reason, Bitwig etc…". i wonder why you didn't go for that one.
its not "my kind of mastering". its just modern pro mastering.
@@APMastering So all mastering engineers are using Reaper or Cubase? Sounds a bit fan boyish.
🤣 chill bro
@@Kane_O_307 no. I know some engineers who use wavelab and when they get stems they have to use cubase or something to mix that down and then bounce it out again into wavelab. IMHO that workflow is outdated and I will get superior results, quicker, than engineers who do that. Engineers who use soundblade, sadie, pyramix etc are just using outdated legacy nonsense and again I can work quicker and more effectively in reaper.
Well you probably can't either, so here we are :)
three minutes in and you sound like another dude i know who has a very limited mindset.
This things you are complaining about sounn like some that can be easily achieved with some analytical vst that that u see
L / R Channel.
You should get into max for live find your likeminded people, you can make any effect or setup in max for live and it keep getting better. its an integration. for a generation. Maybe u make the community better. The guys over at ableton keep improving there software and they listen more than ever.
but i can see allot of your points coming from your perspective. Maybe Ableton dont want to expand that way, and let other software makers dominate in the Master category. have you tried the luna daw? is it good for mastering?
I recently rated Ableton live as A tier, mostly because of Max. I actually have a full license for Max/MSP and did my university dissertation using it many years ago. But everything you are saying here has zero to do with mastering.
@@APMastering i mean, the batch render, and all the work Flows. I dont remember allt he things.
But in my mind, i was like, if you like ableton, you could make scripts for the things thats missing.
Maybe u have allready tried.
If mastering is all u do, it makes sense using a software that has features for it. I totally see that.
One of the Worst things with ableton live is that u cant drag new audio files from arrangement view into file system in a clean way.
People who make drum kits and shit got to render every sound.
It should be drag and drop.
@APMastering I don't think you went to University 😊
I do video game audio professionally and this debate about Reaper has been going on for absolutely ages and became a meme in the community.
I, personally, absolutely cannot imagine doing my work in any other DAW just because how efficient, feature proof and expandable Reaper is.
Wildcard rendering (naming by folders, items, item numbers, etc. etc), regions, markers, subprojects for very very complex in game systems which need multiple layers ( could probably be an improvement in your workflow for stem mastering, check it out).
Additionally there are countless scripts. If you are aware of the things that take a long time and can be systemised - you can just easily customise it or pay someone to write you a script. Hell, there is an official Wwise integration script for Reaper.
Again, I am speaking from my own perspective as a sound designer, where batch rendering 50 assets with proper naming is pretty much a daily chore. And that chore would make me want to kill myself if I had to use Ableton or Bitwig, even though I do sometimes write music in those DAWs, because quite honestly Reaper is a bit painful for creative music production.
What kills me is that people just ignore the efficiency part and write it off as not important and something to look past. This is literally one of the most important, if not the most important part in day to day work, as it not only speeds up itteration times quite drastically but also keeps you sane and just that tad further from your eventual mental breakdown 🤣
P.S. Most people I know work in Reaper, some work in Nuendo, and a small small minority works in Ableton
exactly, wild card rendering is non negotiable. i actually use a wild card in this video but for mastering i don't need that many, for exporting stems for live performance i use more
@@HOLESHOT808 ha ha ha mastering engineers don't use channel strips
TLDR: you can master individual tracks in DAWs like ableton and bitwig, but try to do anything beyond that and you’ll end up wasting time and losing money.
exactly.
@@vjmcgovern You would if you approached it trying to replicate how you would do in old school linear DAWs like Reaper but the power of especially Bitwig is you are not resteicted by linear workflows. I use Reaper for multichannel work but Bitwig for Stereo and multitrack.
YOU can’t, literally thousands of others do. Perhaps you like some features or workflow of one, but it doesn’t make the work of the majority of the industry disappear 🤣 what a take.
I can do mastering in any DAW but I wouldn't because it's idiotic to lose so much money because I don't want to use a $60 program where the free demo never runs out
@@APMastering "I can do mastering in any DAW " - doesn't this statement literally contradict the title of your video?
@@APMastering The blessing the curse of click bait.
@@Joe90Production he detailed that efficiency of workflow is essential to be able to master 1000 songs per year. Some with multiple versions or edits, some with vinyl masters separate from their CD or streaming service masters, etc. Why can I make perfect sense of his take but some people have some much trouble? You can probably ‘master’ a single track in audacity. Doesn’t mean it’s viable for full time use
If you have watched the full video he says why you can't.
He doesn't say it's physically impossible, he says that it will just take you more time and effort for the same result.
In Studio One you can store different versions of a song in the same file and recall them. Then you can have a project page linked to each song and master each of them separately, and if you change the mix, you can update project page. You can also export Stems in Studio One automatically.
how am i supposed to master without soundgoodizer
I've been mastering for over 20 years and have stuck with WaveLab. I had no idea Reaper was so capable though! Still, I'm doing a few DDP images a year and it doesn't appear Reaper can do that as readily.
nice one. yeah DDP support is fairly bad in reaper but i still do it
@@APMastering Yeah I saw there was a way, but I'm old and set in my ways 😄
Don’t mind me. I’m here for the comments, and Weaver response 😊
In before the inevitable Weaver roast lol 😂
Love your advocacy for Reaper. While it may not be the DAW for everyone, there is no denying that it's the most powerful DAW on the market.
Sincere question: if I've mastered songs for "large"/Grammy-nominated artists in Ableton, workflow aside, are they not professionally mastered? I liked this vid, not trying to be flippant at all, always learning 20 years in... I do this for a living, appreciate everyone's perspective. Cheers, C.
the difference between professional result and professional workflow is the key here
@walterconcrete sound is all that matters to an amateur.
@walterconcrete i'll happily tell all of my paying clients that sound is only one of multiple important parts of professional mastering
@APMastering Pardon my french, but that sounds like bullshit IMO. What defines professionality is the way you handle yourself with clients and the achievements you have under your belt with those clients. If you've earned a Grammy and proved yourself in the industry, then your workflow is professional no matter what anyone else says. In a lot of ways, if your workflow is what helped inform your decisions when working on those award-winning albums, then that workflow is an aspect of your artistic expression. Whenever you work on something as a mixing or mastering engineer, you leave a part of yourself in that song's sound. The fact that your workflow works for you (and in a lot of cases only you) and not everyone means you've carved out and refined your taste and style.
@@SeanGonzalezMDHEXT perfectly stated. i challenged AP to a mastering competition and he passed. That says a lot.
Professional level mixing and mastering can and is actively being done in daws like Ableton. You can be really efficient too.
No, I can't do all of this in Ableton. You can do alot of the stem stuff though using clips as regions and groups. It's easy to print the aux tracks, and freezing>flatten and consolidate automatically save wavs of the track with the original track name so it's pretty stupid fast. Loop back is always on screen so I can bounce the stems or the multitracks of a song with and without effects and print effects separately as quickly as the song plays start to finish. I think most things you'd need to be streamlined, you can set up with a midi controller, midi to keystroke program and a good template.
I don't do enough mastering for this to ever be much of a thought, but I'm also in the camp of people who think mastering is overcomplicated by those who do it for a living in order to keep the job relevant. I feel like a standardized eq curve controlled by MB compression, saturation, limiting, mid/side processing and volume automation pretty much does the trick for most stereo track mastering jobs. All the heavy lifting and dynamics control is done in mixing in my case.
I'm open to discussion on this topic but after 6 years doing this stuff, if found that to be my conclusion.
making the music is 10x faster in ableton. I and if you just release like 90% of the rest of the world directly from any daw without any formal mastering then the mastering format he is talking about here from 2 decades ago isn't even necessary for that.
APMastering: I only do mastering and no mixing
Also APMastering: sometimes I get 100 stems or more 👀
sure but i just sum them like i show here and ignore that i have stems
Look up the original definition of mastering- it has evolved and changed so much that the current job description is impossible to pin down outside of the fact that they’re creating the “master” file. The truth remains that most amateurs think mastering will take care of mixing mistakes when in fact they simply need to hire a more qualified mixing engineer, which is why a good mastering engineer will send the song back to be properly mixed when necessary.
The formats required just for film/TV alone are crazy because of what they want to do with songs these days. Looping sections, removing elements, etc Just because you see “stem” doesn’t mean it needs to be “mixed” - but you’d have to be in that industry to know what’s actually being done. No shade, of course 👍
@@thisaintart 100%. when people send 100 stems, I just sum them until I hear a problem. and if it sounds like nonsense, I ask to hear their working mix. if that sounds bad, I reject it with feedback. that's an important part of my job, QC. I'm not going to spontaneously start mixing stuff.
I think the main issue nowadays is agreeing on what mastering is to begin with, because the hobbyist crowd is so large. The majority of the online space is amateurs who are throwing up one track at a time on UA-cam or streaming. For this use case, you can master in any DAW, because then you're just dealing with one stereo file. But a pro who is working on a whole album, and doesn't always have the luxury of only receiving stereo mixes, needs to be able to adapt to different situations on the fly, alongside dealing with multiple revisions and client requests. And that is where Reaper shines, because of how flexible it is, while not charging an arm and a leg for being dedicated mastering software. To me what was interesting was your touching on numerous features of Reaper that I have never used, despite having worked on some EPs with some local bands. I found out I could have saved myself a load of time with these things. Time to get back to discovering even more features in Reaper. It's crazy how deep it goes.
exactly!
At the end of the day the only thing that matters is the way it sounds and that the client is happy. I asked a sincere question and was met with a nonsense non-answer. It appears you do not appreciate constructive criticism either, calling some commenters trolls. Play stupid games (clickbait) win stupid prizes. In my experience those that talk about stuff online all day and always need to be right, which is essentially the premise of your entire channel, are just making noise instead of actually trying to be helpful. Why don't you share a reel of your work? Or is that a troll-ish request?
The best part about this video is that it teaches what mastering actually is on a fundamental level, compared to what is usually perceived as "mastering" by more inexperienced audio people (slapping a compressor, eq and limiter on the master track and exporting "1.wav")
agree. I think many people don't really understand what is going on with pro mastering which is why ozone is a big seller.
@@APMastering There needs to be a distinction made between pro mastering vs. mastering only for streaming. If you know your music will never be pressed to CD or especially vinyl, and if you're a social media artist whose audience is listening on their phones, then Ozone does a pretty good job. I know a few pros who use it for this purpose. One guy also likes using a few of Ozone's modules within his larger mastering chain.
But if we take the limited definition of mastering as that last step in the process where you are trying to enhance a stereo mix, then Ozone is an option. It's not the best at anything, but it is a decent jack of all trades, if a user actually bothered to learn each module and learnt to tweak them properly.
And again, it comes back to "what is mastering". It probably doesn't help that mastering is not always the same process for every song, just as mixing changes for every song. If people could understand that alone, then they would understand why mastering isn't just throwing on Ozone on the stereo mix (though that could be one option). And it also comes down to taste. In some cases, clients like the Ozone master, and if that's the case, so be it.
@@whaleguy mastering isnt enhancing the mix necessarily. if your audience listens with phone speakers then there's no reason to bother much about sound quality
Obviously theres not only one way to do it, but this is actually what professional mastering is, when you make a living out of it. Thanks again Alain.
I have a very simple idea that can put this to rest. Mastering battle. You do you, I do Ableton, blind test on UA-cam, let the results do the talking. It would be fun, informative, and I will win ;)
in this video i'm not talking about sound but rather about workflow efficiency
@PinkCoven66 🧌
@@APMastering what a cop out. You literally made a clickbait video and got called out and asked to put your money where your mouth is. You say "you cannot master professionally in Ableton." I said yes you can and offered a simple challenge and you declined. That is cowardly and basically makes your entire video pointless.
@ you completely failed to understand the video
I would also add a stopwatch to the challenge. How long did it take to get the results. APM seems to put a lot of emphasis on that here. Let us all see whether overcomplicating the process is really faster.
Mastering is about sound, not about superficial workflow tricks that don't matter once the audio is ultimately bounced. I thought this video would be about different DAWs and their summing engines, you know, sound. Instead, it's really just a thinly veiled reaper advert. Lol
No one has an interesting summing engine to talk about. There's really only one conventional way to do it.
i'm not affiliated with reaper. i'm just talking about pro mastering workflow. so obviously workflow is important in a video on workflow
mastering is about sound, but getting paid adequately for what you are doing requires very efficient workflow that has nothing to do with sound. I don't use reaper and i master only if i really have to, but i agree 100% on what he says in the video.
@@SamueleForteBefore the advent of the DAW, mastering was done with none of these comforts and conveniences. With this in mind, everything he points out is once again superficial.
@@APMastering The word “Workflow” is no where on your video title. If you’re going to make clickbait content, don’t insult my intelligence.
The point about process ergonomics is fair, and large scale projects such as multiple revisions would be beyond tedious to master with the workflows that some DAWs are designed around. That being said, I didn't particularily appreciate the gish gallop of ostensibly ever increasing complexity, when all we honestly are talking about is growing number of tracks fed into different subgroups.
I still think the conclusion of the video is somewhat disingenuous. I mean, "if you can't do a full album with multiple song revisions that are essentially 100+ tracks multitracks each, then you can't do mastering on your DAW". The point you are trying to drive home can be paraphrased as "I am a professional and I have seen all these things that you probably haven't, so don't you ever dare to think you are mastering unless you are doing a full album with multiple revisions in one go, like me." Gatekeeping much?
I didn't bother watching all the way through since I doubt the argument got any refined towards the end, but hope you also threw quad and ATMOS mixes in there, you know, for good measure.
I think that is an extremely uncharitable interpretation of my video. I'm discussing using DAWs to do professional mastering. So yes, if you can't do stem mastering for complex projects then you are incompetent at that job and are not pro level. gatekeeping? no. just reality.
@@APMastering the video title states that we can't do mastering in our DAW which is not true at all. You should rename the title to "this is why your DAW is not optimized for professional multi clients mastering"
when I say "do mastering", I mean use it to do the tasks of a mastering engineer. like I say at the start of the video, if you think mastering consists of slapping ozone or whatever on your song, then you are speaking about something else. for me that is not doing mastering.
@@APMastering well your interpretation of it is wrong mastering is enhancing a mix so that it can translate the vision of the artist on many systems. You don't need Reaper to do this.
that's not what the profession of mastering is defined as in my opinion. I guess we disagree and can go no further.
Good that you showed that is more than just one song with a limiter and clipper on it, it's actually albums and arrangements.
Thinking about it a bit more, it seems obvious that professional mixing and mastering engineers would want very different things out of their DAWs than producers, diy artists or just people who are more hobbyists. For me personally the "best DAW" is the one that i'm the most inspired to work with and gets in my way the least. E.g. I care a lot about stock instruments, which probably don't matter at all to engineers. So talking about the original tier list video, that might be a criticism of the concept. I would want to ask questions like: "Is reaper a better tool for professional engineers than logic for diy artists?"
exactly, that was a big limitation of the original video and the original was just really my subjective opinion from my perspective. I think people took it all a bit too seriously relative to my original intention for it just to be a fun tier video
As a studio one user I can fill you in a bit on the S1 mastering capabilities: it can do most things that you showed are good about reaper, but NOT when stem-mastering. The mastering (project page) and mixing (song page) are very seperate and you have to bounce things and can then automatically import them to a project. This is a great workflow for people who master their own music, but it would definitely slow you down a lot when mastering professionaly, because you'd always have to create songs first with the stems and then bounce them and go back and bounce again if you want to adjust something in the stems. But as a solo guy you probably have those project already anyways from producing and mixing
exactly. this is the same workflow that I have an issue with concerning wavelab. Some mastering engineers who I am friends with use wavelab and when they get stems they have to mix them in a separate step and then import them into wavelab. the problem with this is, when I'm mastering an album, I will often go back and forth tweaking the stems constantly in small amounts, going back and forth between the different tracks on the album. Anyone who is stuck in the stereo only, one song at a time, old school mastering workflow, is just wasting time in the studio IMHO.
You can do this in a regular studio one session easily just use folder tracks
@@shaferproducergod yeah sure, but then you'll be missing many features listed in the video or accessible in the S1 project page. It's possible but not ideal
@ ill admit the combined waveform view is pretty cool but not something I really need for mastering
Point 1. You can do that on Ableton. Press CMD while dropping all the tracks on the arrangement and automatically the DAW will overlap all of them vertically. Making them automatically aligned and ready for reproduction.
At first I was like "what?“. But you're so right. And you explain it very well.
If someone sent a real mastering engineer 100 stems, they would be laughed out of the room. 😅
I think what you're missing here, in a "forest for the trees" situation, is that *you should not* master your own work, in a perfect world. Someone with the skillset can master your work in any daw just fine, because they are a degree removed from any attachment biases, they are given criteria and they promise they can achieve the goal of the process. As far as someone who releases tracks sporadically, one here and there, it becomes irrelevant how they are mastered, just that they sound great. Because in that scenario, the classical definition of mastering is already lost. The next best definition is that the track sounds great, and sounds great when flanked by other musical projects in similar vein, so that they can share playlists easily. If the mastering is done in a way that is obtuse to the consensus they can not easily share time within the same playlist, for most people and most scenarios.
Mastering in modern times has reached a point where it's pretty far removed from the prior three phases it went through. Technical mastering-by-measurement in the early days, adding artistic and project-solidifying mastering of the past 60 years, and finally modern technical mastering on a per-song basis. There is a consensus of what is expected, and mastering should bring the work in-line with that consensus.
As an artist and engineer myself, the practice of allowing others to master a multi-song project is highly advisable. It does not matter what tool they use to do so, just that the resultant product is up to the expectations of the client, which likely includes technical requirements and mastering artistry, and/or as promised to the client.
So YOU can't master YOUR OWN WORK in Live, Bitwig, etc. But if you want the best possible outcome, someone else surely can.
Cheers and good luck with the channel!
thanks. I feel like if you are just increasing the loudness of your own music to be in line with other stuff in a playlist, this does not constitute mastering. At least that is not what I mean when I use the term mastering. Not if a professional mastering engineer is using Ableton or something, I would be able to speed up their productivity significantly and save them literally hundreds of hours of studio time per a year by mentoring them in reaper. It probably might be realistic to double literally their income. The difference would be that radical. I think that would be grounds to say that you can't use Ableton if you are serious. that would just be insane.
Well said. Please ignore the tush-hurt response from APM.
You sir, are a legend. Thanks for sharing the honest and real information about your job and the industry. I'm a live engineer and it can be frustrating knowing certain facts about gear/concepts that are generally misconceived as a whole.
This guy makes videos for an actual audience of probably 10 mastering engineers while rage-bating all non reaper users. Unsubscribing.
You're complaining, not critiquing 🤣🤣 I think he'll be okay with your absence
This.. Took me two videos to release this, can be very misleading. He really is conviced everyone would be better off switching to his favorite daw:)
@@JamesWestMusicMan That was literally a critique xD
Have you checked the mastering section in PreSonus Studio One ?
Hey,
I’m a little confused as to why you say you “can’t” master in Ableton (or Logic). Revisions and album mastering is perfectly possible in Ableton. DAWs today are so similar that if you can’t do your job in it, it’s more of a workflow problem.
In my eyes, if the client is happy, you’ve done a good job. I’m sure a lot of other engineers would agree.
Awesome video, as someone doing mastering in reaper too, I'd love to be able to see how to set up all the stuff you've talked about in this video.
I really need to speed up my workflow, and find a way to get Uber efficient 🤔
"I run an assembly line for audio" is what I'm hearing.
have you worked as a pro engineer?
@@APMastering I find it gross that you're dick-waving at me.
I produce, mix and master in Bitwig. I have a templates for each sessions. I find Bitwig to be the easiest and have the fastest workflow of all the DAW’s I’ve been trying. However I never do Stem mastering, but I could setup a template for that too. Bitwig has a great section for writing down ideas and notes. I do think that you develop a workflow that suits you with the DAW you’re working with. ❤️
More rage baiting, but lets actually summarize what I learned from your DAW tier video. It seems clear that you’re a fan of Reaper, which is perfectly fine, but it’s important to acknowledge that your evaluations may reflect personal biases rather than a balanced, professional analysis. It appears that you may not actively use all the DAWs you’re rating, and assumptions about their capabilities-particularly if based on limited or outdated experience-can misrepresent their current functionality in 2024.
This is a common issue among content creators, as confirmation bias and clicks often influences opinions. While it’s natural to have preferences, it’s problematic when those preferences are framed as objective assessments under the guise of professionalism. Love for a particular DAW, such as Reaper, is valid, but presenting that enthusiasm as an impartial review can lead to misleading conclusions. In other words if you're going talk the talk show us that you walk the walk. Put Reaper up against the current versions of Studio One, Logic or even Cubase as an all around DAW and let's see what happens. Use objective categories such as price, features, Interface, usability content etc... and then we can have a conversation. Simply saying no one mixes and masters in FL studio is not just disingenuous it's actually not true.
I agree that I am not an expert in all of the DAWs I ranked but if I were to be an expert in all of them, I'd need to buy all of them and use them working on many projects. Nobody can reasonably do this with 17 different DAWs. It was just my subjective opinion. Not sure why everyone is so outraged that I gave my opinion on DAWs.
@@APMastering I’m not outraged, but I prefer opinions grounded in real-world experience and practical usage. As someone who owns and actively uses seven different DAWs, I find most of these ranking videos to be a disservice to the community. While I’m not a mastering engineer and wouldn’t presume to argue with a professional about their craft, it’s equally unproductive to rank tools without actually using them or providing an informed, professional perspective. That approach reflects a certain blind fanaticism rather than constructive information. Just FYI
A shout-out to Samplitude from me. That's what I use for both CD, tape and vinyl mastering. It's the little brother of Sequoia.
I wouldn't use Samplitude to make beats though. Sure you can do it, but that's where I think Studio One, Ableton or FL Studio might be a more convenient choice.
You can master in most in daws. Workflow is personal. You can turn a bolt with a ratchet or a spanner, both achieve the final result, just different workflow.
try working construction without power tools
Did you actually watch his video?
Great video. I didn't realize Reaper could handle those complex tasks so well. I finally sold on it, and will be checking out the demo in the near future when time allows. It would be awesome for you to make a video on how to setup Reaper for mastering sessions, especially related to rendering and revision workflows (preferences, settings, etc too). Thanks!
all in my mastering course.... don't think I will make a UA-cam video on this though because it is way too niche.
@@APMasteringI’d watch it in a heartbeat!
Just remember to take your time to actually "learn" Reaper and to explore its possibilities. the learning curve may seem to be tough but I guarantee it is so worth it!
The big trap in Reaper is to always fiddle and improve UI, just because it's possible. It's crucial to stop at some point.
"I want to be able to see the stereo" was where you lost me.
I personally mix and master with my ears, not my eyes.
it's not about looking at the waveform, it's about pretending it's the stereo mix
Studio One is where I do everything from idea to finished album.
Many of the most known mastering engineers in the commercial electronic music business use Ableton for mastering xD they are pretty much pros lol
sure but their workflow is
horribly inefficient
@@APMasteringin the end I think you can argue about what is more important, efficiency vs an end result that sounds good. There are many efficient and fast restaurants out there yet they all do not make the most delicious food. Some chefs might make very delicious food and the craft is slow and thoughtful yet the restaurant visitors don’t worry about it because the food there is unique and tastes better than in other restaurants! This does not make the chef less of a professional, just a chef that values the end result more than saving time on certain parts of the process. I just think its a matter of defining the term ”professional” here! Just my five cents:)
@ a pro is efficient and good, not one or the other, that's why he is successful. being inefficient is a limiting factor in being a pro
Yeah! I’d say pro is efficient enough and good. Then you can always optimize certain things to save some more time. You could do a study in this, how much time do professional mastering engineers use on each respective part of the process, and practically testing each processes in a daw with a timer, using the daw as efficiently as you can. There could be something for us all to learn there! Would be interesting to see
I totally agree with you. Since ages I believe DP as an alternative too has been used to do all the things you mentioned.
exactly, like I said in my previous video DP is serious and can do much of this stuff too
What about Cubase? I experimented with it a little bit on mastering. It seem pretty good.
i say here cubase is fine
Nuendo and Cubase are the best.
First of all big Thanks for doing this ! I feel like you really care about us
I can do all that with ableton:
-it has static time markers, I can make a template set with them 100ms apart. I do have to drop each file onto the corresponding marker, but that takes a minute or two.
-again, you can make custom template sets. I have templates for singles vs albums, templates for various genres & mastering styles
-I just use whatever is easiest for the client in terms of note taking 🤷♂️ sometimes apple stickies, sometimes google drive, sometimes I just send a copy paste of my notes along with the files in the email… they don’t need to be integrated into the project file imho; though that is a COOL feature.
-I don’t master with my eyes, so I don’t need to *see* the non-destructive stereo sum of all the stems or songs. I just need to know the stems are all being summed to the master channel or if multiple stem songs in same project, that their respective stems are all being summed on their buss channels. I can minimize tracks in ableton so it doesn’t look cluttered with abuncha stems. If I really want to *see* the stereo sum, I can use resampling in Ableton. Don’t have to bounce out, don’t have to leave ableton at all, just add a new audio track, set to resampling input, it’s rendering out of the master channel, takes a min or two. I can’t say that would be non-destructive… but again, I don’t have to do that at all! I don’t master with my eyes. I just work on the master chain (final chain in ableton) & minimize the stems. Or if I have multiple songs in stem form in an album project file, I can buss the stems of each song and just work on that buss. Using grouping or return tracks (I use returns). And then I have a full album chain on that master channel that applies to all songs.
-if they want the WHOLE album a half dB louder… I wouldn’t have to redo my fades or start over with that final process… if it’s an album project, I’m just going to tweak my sequential compressors or limiters on the final chain that’s applied to the whole album… if it’s a single, uhm, bumping it up a half dB is fairly painless, and doesn’t require redoing fades & such? Maybe the disconnect here is that I don’t really do vinyl mastering?
-working with multiple revisions & consolidating/importing individual tracks from other revisions is easy, don’t have to leave ableton or even go to finder/file manager. I can open a project from ableton sidebar, view all the buss tracks & individual tracks in the sidebar, even preview them; and then drop in whatever I want into the current project from the other revision just like dropping a sample in)
-Yes, Ableton Suite and my M4 Pro Mac Mini can absolutely handle a gapless stem album with 200-300 tracks. And I can make it not look like a clusterfuck with collapsing tracks, color coding, etc.
-when I use dithering (on non-streaming masters for live/club use), I use ozone’s dithering, not ableton. Imho ozone has better dithering. Correct me if wrong.
-I use fabfilter, izotope, but mostly antelope DSP+FPGA AFX highly accurate analog emulations (much more true to analog than universal audio bs). I only work in ableton for the automation, panning, stem control, etc etc. Features that all daws have.
-also, say I have an album of songs in stem form all in one project, and each song has all their stems feeding into a buss return track, and each buss track/complete song feeds into a master chain where my final album glue chain is… I can tell ableton to export each of the buss tracks individually but rendering them all at once in one batch… with each one rendering out of the master chain seperately… my file names & fades & etc will be retained and they’ll export as individual tracks out of the final master “glue chain”.
My mans. I love how you have planks of wood holding up vinyl, and tools on the desk. We need a DIY desk build video from you.
i dont use these, but wouldnt pro tools and nuendo be the right tools, eg when you also have to deal with atmos? for my own little projekt i used studio one for the mastering job (with exported mixes from ableton) because it has a fast lufs measurement, wavelab also has some nice batch tools. reaper is very flexible and you can setup and program many things, but dont this consume too much time? and do you do all your mastering in the box? I also use 2 Hardware tools, because its much quicker to get the right results with them than with plugins.
Reaper has a really steep learning curve because of how feature rich and customizable it is. It's not friendly to the newcomer by any means, but it can do things no other DAW can.
This confirms absolutely something I’ve felt for a good while. Learn multiple DAWs for different purposes.
I use Ableton primarily and have for years. Recently I’ve picked up more with Pro Tools and Logic, and always had the latter two as ideal for separate mixdown processes.
Making EDM, I lived by the idea of a track being mixed down so well that the master just needs a limiter. But I deal with other genres too, and IMO that concept just does not work for things outside of EDM.
How'd you get reaper to show the sum on the folder track? For me it only shows all the tracks layered on top of each other and not the sum...
should do it out of the box
It's the default setting, you should see the sum automatically in the parent track of the folder. Maybe your folder structure is not set up right?
@@FPAudioLabs my folder structure is definitely setup correctly. If it is the default do you know where I can find the setting for it? I can't find anything on the internet and in my preferences there's only on or off for the folder waveform display (stacked and not summed). I'm on 7.26
@@leonordmann can you share a screenshot?
Should we rename DAWs to DAPs (Digital Audio Production-stations) then?
No - some people are still stuck saying Dee-Ay-Double U, instead of DAW (rhymes with Law, Paw, etc). Nothing you can do.
9:37 if you could do a tutorial on how you are doing this multiple render with the markers and stuff that would be amazing. It indeed looks to be an optimal way to render out a batch of beats or tracks. *edit* figured it out pretty quick, i didn't get the LUFs overviews on export. VERY useful though.
you can change from rms to lufs the options on the render page
I think a cool video idea for the future would be breaking down misconceptions about what mastering even is, because a lot of people including myself might be confused as to what "mastering" really is because alot of people just equate it to, like you said, making the audio sound clear and loud on whatever the listener is using whether it be ipods or nice speakers or shitty speakers for that matter. Also would love to hear before and after of what you can do with sounds.
Now since I'm still not exactly sure what the difference between stems and tracks are and yes, I do know what tracks are, but. What the hell exactly are stems?
As for mastering, I don't do it. I don't have the ears to do it properly. ALl I do is try to get the best mix that I possibly can and then I send the tracks off to get mastered. I'm running Cubase 13 Pro and although i think I could master with it, why not get someone who's better to do it?
The workflow issue works both ways. Ableton/Bitwig etc are optimized for different stages of making music - i.e in both cases sound design and idea generation - with a lot of built in facilities for juggling multiple ideas and so on.
I combine logic pro and RX7 . After i started doing this it improved a lot. But i am not a mastering engineer
aslo you can definitely master your own track in any daw and get a professional result.
"master your own track and get a professional result" != "pro mastering"
@@APMastering many people do. its cheaper and the tools to learn ho are online. unless we are talking about live bands and stuff. but most electronic music is mastered by the original artist
@3:00 do you use Reaper Subprojects for your stems?
Also you didn't cover Meta Data which is what I also think is important for a mastering house to be able to provide...Reaper also does that too.
metadata is a scam in mastering. might make a video. don't use subprojects but it's cool nonetheless
@@APMastering ??? Metadata is crucial for digital distribution, copyright tracking, royalty payments, and ensuring that listeners and platforms can accurately identify your music. but I'd like to see your take on it.
@APMastering That is the most Amateurish thing I have heard you say. Your are not really "In the Industry" are you?
Professionally, effectiveness wins. Again we are talking mastering, not composing a tune. If you're a bedroom musician doing one track a year, in which case your journey (from start to finish) and focus is quite different, yes your fav DAW will do.
I do agree with this lad. I've been a electronic music producer for like forever. It's pretty common that you do all in a row, if you are serious you take a night break between mixing and master and don't produce the whole song in one sitting (which is btw pretty common as well) but those are arguable professional studios and rather in another room in their flat. looking to tracks produced professional we are looking at tracks from swifty, dre j balvin and so on. and no they are recorded and mastered in a different setting usually. (and as always - yes there are exceptions but the general take is like that)
One question, are APComp and Versatile Compressor the same plugin?
versatile compressor is the latest version which was significantly overhauled from the original apcomp prototype. the code is so different that i called it a different thing
I love Reaper, its mindset and its feature-orientation, and I'm currently learning to use it.
However, despite that, the argument at 11:09 doesn't hold much water when you point out the fact that Reaper lacks *extremely* basic features for a DAW for making music in, namely instruments.
Reaper doesn't come with even a drum machine.
It could entirely excel in regards to producing recorded music, but saying that it has a "learning curve" when it comes to music-making omits the fact that you absolutely *must need* external instruments to use the program.
It's incomplete. It assumes the user will have their own instruments, as opposed to more music-making oriented DAWs which have far, far superior stock plugin and sample libraries, and you can actually produce entire songs in without having a single piece of gear or downloading a single VST.
This doesn't negate the mastering opinion (the title is a bit controversial but I guess that's what gets clicks), but it is a half-hearted defense in that regard, in my eyes.
just download reapack and then you have access to a whole bunch of plugins, for example the tucan studios plugins, instantly for free. reaper is more of a DAW you use when you bring your own specific stuff to it rather than trying to be a playground of premade stuff. in terms of sample libraries, I've never used other people's sounds to make my music so not sure about that.
Absolute rubbish
tucan plugs are rubbish? they are very good. I really like purple gate.
@@APMastering lol no we must have been typing at the same time. No, the “reaper doesn’t even have a drum machine” argument above is rubbish.
Reaper costs $60. Go buy what you need with the money you save over ableton or whatever and there’s also tons of free stuff out there.
You can buy way better instruments than any DAW currently has. Most people buy some instruments that can be used in multiple DAWs.
Great video, sir. Loved seeing the candid workflow. A+++
So what is the most popular software for mastering engineers? I would assume that it is still Pro Tools?
Depends on what you’re trying to do. Are you handling ISRCs/metadata? The “Pro Tools” of mastering has been Wavelab, although clearly outdated. You’ve also got Nuendo, Reaper, Sequoia, Pryamix, Sound Forge Pro, Acoustica, Soundblade, SawStudio, etc.
exactly. there are many choices which people use for mastering. IMHO all of them are dumb apart from reaper and nuendo/cubase and maybe DP but I need to use the latest version to confirm DP.
garageband
It seems to me like you just enjoy Reaper's workflow most and you have some good reasons to feel like that, but Bitwig surely has great workflows for mastering as well. I wouldn't want group tracks to show the sum of the waveforms of its tracks for example, because that changes anyway when you start to add any effects to the tracks. you have to load an oscilloscope to see the correct waveform, as that effect can update itself constantly. Also looking at waveforms is only part of the job, isn't it? It's mostly about the resulting sound, especially nowadays with automatic gain matching on listening platforms. It doesn't matter anymore what the waveform looks like, unless it suffers from dc offset. Bitwig starts to shine when you wanna add parallel processing to your effect chain, which is always a great way to make things subtle and no other DAW even approximates Bitwig's superior routing workflow.
reaper can not only do parallel stuff but theoretically dozens of parallel signal chains per track. i think bitwig is great but it needs some more features like i lay out in this video. if you could at least do batch rendering it would be better for mastering but as it is, it's not possible to work at a high level for mastering with zero batch rendering for example, that's just an absolute nightmare for professional work
@APMastering the export menu should also have a normalize feature
What about the DT990 Pro's from Beyerdynamic?
Are they a decent option?
Is cubase a daw where you Are able to master in even of it is not as good as reaper?
cubase is just fine but I personally prefer reaper
Mastering is all about playback of sound on multiple systems, you got to get your room and monitoring system sorted and create a flat room where you can tell the difference between levels on different media, instantly, our ears are analog, we are analog, therefore you need to address that to its full potential before you get into DAW, your next step is to find the DA and then AD converter that will help enhance your monitoring system. Cubase is a very strong DAW, because it is very transparent, lastly I will say you should NeVer bounce all your tracks into a stereo master channel, there is some facts with mathematics you need to understand and then you will hear the difference,
Great video on many aspects,
Good Luck!
to be fair the better the mix the less focus will be on mastering
with ableton there are max 4 live plug ins which eliminate a ton of the issues you are finding with it. examples would be a notepad there are ways to get around these things
another point is it depends on what you are doing, if i am producing music i'll have projects and finished songs where each time i am going to be exporting a single audio file to be mastered and same goes for EPs/albums, i'll always be finishing a song then rendering out of that single project so a lot of what you're saying wouldn't really be issues
i have reaper as i use it when creating sound design for video etc, never looked into it as a mastering specific program. i will have to give it a go and see how it goes for mastering projects.
good video and thanks for giving reaper some love, i told a lot of people to use this as a sound design specific program as it's use with video editing built in is amazing.
Very interesting. Really grateful for the update on this issue, I was super curious. Cheers.
thanks
Ah, so the DAWs listed aren't good for 'professional mastering and music production' I see. I could see how people may take the title/thumbnail and rush to comment without actually knowing what the video says
Needless to say I agree honestly. Different DAWs serve different purposes and some do things better, it's just the way it is
If someone's like me and just produces music for fun then concerning themselves with workflow efficiency and other things would probably just be a secondary issue, but I could totally see how this changes the moment that your income in a career is depending upon stuff like that. Like I use Fl Studio and I just do some very very basic mastering and that's it, but again, that's purely because music to me is just a silly hobby, not a *professional* job.
Really informative video, nice!
Can you tell me name of this theme of reaper?
it's my own custom theme
So not for sharing 🫠?@@APMastering
your list made sense to me apart from cubase thats def A. i wanted to disagree about mastering but ive never mastered someone elses album so im not totally sure if i would feel like something was missing. ableton is still my pick because i think its best for production
Hi, what Surface controller are you using to make automation on reaper?
my mouse and keyboard
@APMastering the hard way
Ultimately, the only thing that matters in mastering is results. You can achieve the same results mastering in Ableton, Reaper and many other DAWs. Although you may not have access to certain workflow capabilities useful for 'professional mastering' in certain DAWs, It doesn't make the result any less valuable. I am content with mastering in FL Studio for now, and would never switch to other software unless I felt I was missing something I needed, and I really don't expect that to happen anytime soon, considering the same results are possible almost universally among popular DAWs. I can see why people like Reaper but that doesn't make any other DAW less valid for mastering.
@@DM3-Music not when time & money matters in a specialist area..
..... thats why there are solutions out there for mastering... He explain it very well..
Ableton, Reason etc. are not tools designed for that amount of workload & that is okay.
@@sebbosebbo9794I should maybe have been clearer; I was including time in 'results'. I agree that some daws are not optimal for mastering but my point is that they can still achieve what's necessary. I agree with his point that maybe some choices of DAW are unwise, especially if mastering as a career. Money does of course matter but I didn't think it was that important to mention, as it doesn't really relate much to the point I was making; It's not that other DAWs cant be used for mastering (as stated in the video title), It's that they might not be the most efficient choice.
OP... disagree. the thing that matters in any profession is your ability to make money. high quality results allow you to earn more and efficiency does too. do it for the love of music and not for money makes you a hobbyist and then you are not refuting my position that you can't do pro mastering in aböeton
@@APMastering Realistically everyone in pretty much every profession chooses their job and the way they do it based on a middle ground between Ability to make money, Efficiency/using the minimum amount of effort possible, Convenience, and how much they enjoy it. Not all professional mastering engineers use the exact same workflow, because there isn't one that's objectively best. There will always be some amount of personal preference about how you do your job, especially with something as subjective as mastering. There is no 'correct' answer to how to master professionally, so you can't say that anything with which it's possible to achieve professional results is invalid. You're basically saying 'this way is correct and your way is wrong because it seems too suboptimal for me'. The actual process is the only part that doesn't matter to a client, unless they have a specific reason to favour a specific method when they're not even doing the mastering, you are.
No. I don’t think any of my DAWs can do this. Pretty neat that Reaper can handle all this stuff. Great video.
Yes, Cubase was supposed to be A tier. Thank you for saying that.
however.... ua-cam.com/video/eIcZ9wIxTlk/v-deo.html
@APMastering Yes, Reaper is S Tier and Cubase is A Tier.
Hello Sir. Been using R for just a year or two, still a beginner. Would you kindly share, what expansion packs let you set up the file drop process where regions are created automatically and the files land in the window as a cascade? This was impressive. I’d love to have that! Thank you for sharing!
Reaper is such a killer DAW. Since I made the switch in 2012, every time I have to work in another DAW because of a project I feel stuck, they are all so slow to move through. I have professionally worked on Pro Tools, Cubase, Ableton Live, Sonar, Cool Edit Pro, Wavelab, Ardour and Soundforge. From 2004 to 2012 I was totally unpleased with DAW's, they all felt so slow, then I tested Reaper and it just felt easy. But it's ugly-ish and for the tech mind, artsy people may never get it, other DAW's are kinda prettier.
Just change the theme🤷
@@Mansardian I say I use it for 12 years everyday and your conclusion was that I didn't changed themes enough hahahahahaha holy sheet! Power to the people, they say.
I wonder how all those old heads using only outboard gear with little to no presets, or markers even function without being able to view all the stems as one stereo waveform on the fly like you mentioned reaper lets you do. They must either not value their time or get a lot of clients if they're working like that right?!... wait a sec. 🤔Could it possibly just be different strokes for different folks and that people are able to just as good of a result given enough time of them learning a certain process to accomplish the task effectively. To your analogy with the nail gun construction company thing that you pinned in the comments, what about the folks that can build houses in Japan with no nails, nothing but joinery and simple hand tools in just about the same amount of time as a lot of proper non cardboard houses get built in the west. How about the fact that their houses are able to stand the test of time, or hell even brick layers and how quickly they can get a job done building a whole church that will still be around for a hundred years. You just don't get that same result when all you can focus on is corner cutting processes that a lot of big contractors do to save time and effort. They really only do that because that's their end goal, minimize cost, maximize profits. Sure I get it was just an analogy but I imagine its really more relatable to how anyone can pick up and shoot a gun relatively accurate even most kids, but not just anyone can simply pick up a bow and shoot an arrow. No matter how good of a shot you are you just simply cant curve a bullet around an obstacle that's in your way, but when put your time in its not really difficult to curve an arrow, its just how arrows work. This doesnt mean that by default guns are just "better" that's really subjective opinion and down to a lot of factors. Maybe some people aren't living in a world that whether its an arrow or a bullet matters, all they need is something they can get an acceptable result from a process they know how to do best. It's not always about the money in business, especially in the world of art. Usually its well understood that limitations breed creativity and creativity is the soul that makes people's art unique.
This seems like the difference in VFX between amateurs using Adobe After Effects at home or for small freelance projects vs something like Autodesk Flame, which is geared towards efficiency and imediacy because operators are dealing with clients face to face where time is money and you need your shit to work NOW and be rock solid.
People here commenting how XYZ app can do that. Sure maybe to some extent, but HOW does it do it when you are operating in a real-life commercial production environment, not your bedroom?
Great points mate , Ableton deff isnt as efficient but as someone who isnt pro and doesn’t rely on mastering to survive ableton is perfect for me.
Holy cow, Reaper is powerful (in the right hands) - in the wrong hands, it's just annoyingly complex :)
agree
@tristen_grant I do really basic stuff (Ableton User) - I make 90s style hip-hop loops with a bit of sampling, and have my turntable as input source and scratch over the beats, or I do live-looping. I use like 0.1% of the features - and it works perfectly and it's so easy to do.
E.g. I double click a drum-rack "instrument", it automatically makes a new midi channel, then i drag a sampler onto a drum-rack pad, drag 100 kick samples onto the sampler, right click the selection/zones and distribute em, right click to map to a macro knob, and another klick to map it to my midi controller - and within 30 seconds I change samples on-the-fly by just turning a knob. Reaper or any other daw probably can do this too "somehow" - but i would need to really dig deep and read the manual.
This is where Ableton shines.
even better than all of these is wavelab, an actual Mastering DAW
how do i do stems?
@ its easily possible though when wearing my mix engineer hat i work faster in ableton. wavelabs hierarchy of tracks and processing is incredibly flexible (each track can contain up to 7 lanes of clips that can be processed further individually or collectively) and it is way more consistent and smarter w lower-cpu allocation with processing and rendering. in addition the plethora of robust organizing (structurally and metadata) with wide delivery and encoding support makes getting started and done with projects a breeze. i def agree on right tool for jobs and comfortability is a factor but for me reaper seems like more of a headache than just using a dedicated tool for the post processing and delivery systems i expect
also i end up doing a lot of DDP & CD burning which wavelab makes more simple than any modern software (where most aren’t even capable)
love the metaphor of screwdriver, drill and a drill driver. its like yeah you can screw stuff with ableton, but drilling with screwdriver is going to screw things up. pun intended.
This whole video screams, 'I have the best drills, so my construction will look better than yours!' But we all know that’s not the case :-)
silly me expected a free self coded DAW to do better mastering at the end of the video
lol making your own daw is insanity
I use my DAW for recording and ITB *desk* mixing (I use outboard for 98% of my source material and 95% of my fx). I've been using Logic (7, 8, 9) for almost 20 years and recently switched to Reaper for certain tasks/projects. I still love Logic for creating and mixing individual tracks, but I agree, that for client work the workflow in Reaper is next level. I have yet to incorporate Reaper into my own productions, mainly because I use very old tech (2 x Apogee Ensemble (total 16 i/0), SSL Duende DSP) and can't afford the same quality ADDA and DSP for recording and OOB processing with my new(er) Mac. Also, I can work super fast on individual tracks in Logic, using the SSL Duende DSP to mix. I know all the shortcuts, plus I LOVE editing in Logic 9, more than any other DAW. MIDI implementation is not great in Reaper, but as alluded to, mixing and mastering + automation is superb in Reaper.
I can pretty much do that in pro tools. I also use reason and you are correct, reason is great for producing and maybe mixing, but I always finish in pro tools. I already set up my busses to be steams. Example vocals, leads, drums, percussion, brass etc. Then they all feed into the master buss. I can print them and import them into a new seesion for mastering and run the same principle you explained here
sure you imagine you are doing it professionally and you have an album of this. manually sitting here and exporting them to stereo and importing to make the album master is slow and unprofessional in 2024 compared to keeping it accessible but collapsed like in reaper or some other DAWs
Who just sends a bunch of stems without the stereo master why would you need to consolidate all the stems to view the full mix when they should be sending the stems in a folder and their own final master track in a separate? I don't get your initial work process . If you are mastering stems you can create any kind of template for most daws and have it loaded ready to go . Then it's a case of adding the VSTs and whatever fx to each track you want . Unless you are using fruity loops then most other DAWs are very similar . Ableton and Logic can do same stuff but Logic is a fk on takes like 3 extra steps to just be able to manipulate a bit of audio .
Your videos are a single declaration of love to Reaper. And I appreciate that very much 👍👍👍
This is a way better video than the last one, we were missing the why of your thoughts!
glad you found this one more valuable
Minus the automated rendering of individual songs from time marker to time marker, you can (and I have) done all of this in FL Studio. The only annoying part was the individual rendering. EDIT: this was with stereo mixes, though if you keep stems to strict instrument/vocal groupings, the stem mastering bit remains doable in FL Studio. The number of stems has to be reasonable, otherwise it's more of a "multitrack" than "stem" mastering
no batch rendering is an instant disqualifying factor for pro mastering work. I will not waste half my day manually bouncing stuff out
The best DAW is the one that make you more comfortable and more efficient with your workflow. If for mastering is Reaper it's ok. By the way I don't think Ableton ever was the prof. studio standard DAW. Maybe Pro tools or Cubase. But I can't think of a reason why an artist who masters only his own tracks can't do it with Ableton?