When a service is running a promotion on AppSumo you should always approach with some trepidation. A lot of the products advertised aren’t fully polished and run these promotions for brand awareness when they’re just starting out.
Since the boss can’t resist a bargain and with me being the only one in the office with audio production experience, earlier this week I was asked to look at RemasterMedia.
This service promises to clean up your audio in just a few minutes all from the comfort of your browser, no expensive software, no playing with complicated settings. Just upload audio, choose what you want done and BAM, done.
So with a coupon for 180 credits, I had a look to see if it’s worth signing up for.
Note: The service that is offered specifically pertains to the quality of the audio. You’re still going to need to edit out any parts of the audio you don’t want to use.
USABILITY:
As I said the service promises a quick turnaround time and in that respect, it does deliver. Including listening to the 90-second preview that is produced before you download the full version I had my 10 minute mastered audio clip in 3 minutes.
QUALITY:
Probably the most important factor when deciding whether to use this service is how good the actual audio sounds. This is where the optimisation profiles come into play and things get a little complicated:
You can apply each of these profiles to your audio but only one at a time. That 3 minutes I mentioned earlier is only if you select a profile and it instantly fixes your audio to how you want it.
Comparing the same clip that was professionally mastered to one that had been done by RemasterMedia I found the quality good but not great. Because you’re dealing with a computer program over an actual person you’re pretty much stuck with what you have unless you want to spend more credits.
PRICING:
The credits I’ve mentioned earlier are how you pay for the RemasterMedia service. Instead of a monthly subscription plan, you only pay for the amount of audio you need to be fixed. 1 credit = 1 minute of audio.
Different packages are offered depending on how often you will be using the service and there’s also the option to “pay as you go” so you can select the exact number of credits you need for the project you’re working on.
This is one of the main issues I found with RemasterMedia. The trial-and-error nature of the profiles coupled with the fact you need to apply a profile (and spend credits) before applying another one means that you can go through your credits quicker than anticipated.
There is an option to have “custom mastering” done by an actual Sound Engineer but the pricing on this is vague (and the general wording of this section is pretty bad too.)
If you’re going to pay someone to master your audio for you there are plenty of people on Fiverr that can do that for you, the fact RemasterMedia undermines its own product made me feel that even they’re aware that it’s not a solution for everyone.
VALUE – IS IT WORTH IT?:
RemasterMedia is a great concept; remove all the complications out of audio mastering and make it a straight forward process.
Unfortunately, when it comes to cleaning up audio you can’t really apply a “one size fits all” solution and their pricing structure seems designed to get as much money as possible out of users that don’t have experience with audio mastering.
You’re better off spending the time learning the basics of doing it yourself with a free product like Audacity or Garageband if you’re a Mac user.
