It seems whenever the topic of auto mastering comes up, a fire gets lit. It's easy to forget that real people on all sides are working with a common goal in mind: to help people make better recordings with less effort and less out of pocket cost.
And I don't really have a beef with Auto Mastering programs. I just have rarely been happy with the results I've gotten from them. However, I have gotten results that I've kept and released, and AAMS in particular was one of the programs I used to get results on my most recent Album "The End of Silence". I also used EZ Mix 2 on one of the Masters and in the mixes for certain things that I wanted to hear, which my others plugins couldn't do.
The end result was that I used a combination of things, not just AAMS and EZ mix to get the results I wanted out of the final Masters. Most important of all, I used my ears and a monitoring system that I trust and know.
To this end, I want to point out something - getting truly great results out of your mixes takes at least these five things:
1) Recordings that are well done
2) Mixes that sound great and are well balanced
3) Mastering that fills in the gaps and tweaks the balance of the EQ curve.
4) A monitoring system you absolutely trust
5) Objective 'ears'
This is much harder than it looks, so I encourage you to learn as much as you can from sources that are reputable. I love recording forums, but many times the advice I've gotten on them has led me astray.
For The End of Silence, I had mixes I was happy with overall, but there were also problems due to some bad sampling software that introduced a ton of aliasing into the Mix. Because I couldn't afford to just go out and get new sampling software, I had to fix the aliasing in the mix using EQ. This was no small task. I also did some early takes where I had done a sloppy job at recording the instruments. I re-tracked and re-mixed lot of the material this past year to get things up to a standard I was happy with. I would say that I'm overall pleased with the results, but I also think I can do better. That's perhaps a perfectionist tenancy I have, but it also propels me into more learning.
I found that I was also able to use some Mid/side processing techniques to fix more of the aliasing during mastering. The final masters cleaned up nicely and are 100% better than the original mixes. Many of those tracks were run through AAMS, but it also took me making decisions about what I liked and didn't like each time I ran a track through the program. And those decisions did not come until I had listened meticulously to each master on several playback systems that I trust. Some of the masters lacked punch, others lacked clarity while others had some combination of both.
So what I ended up doing was subduing the loudness maximizing from AAMS, then I ran my final mixes through the program until I found something I was happy with. I then imported the 32-bit masters from AAMS into REAPER, and completed some final EQ adjustments, compression, and limiting to get what I chose as the final versions.
On one song, "Our Father", the results I got from AAMS were pretty well exactly what I was looking for. I only took out a bit of harshness in the mid and sides, and did the final loudness maximizing. It was done very quickly.
On another song, "Disappear", I ran it through LANDR and wasn't at all happy with the results. Then I ran it through AAMS and wasn't happy with the results. Then I ran it through Mastering Box and generally liked what I heard, except there was an insane amount of bass distortion and the mids were too scooped. So, what I decided to do with that one was loudness match each with the original and make manual adjustments until I had something I liked better than the other automated masters.
This begs the question: Is auto mastering worthwhile? I think the answer is yes and no. It is not an either/or situation.
I think it's important to test the automated waters and see if the results are better than what you are able to do on your own. If you can afford it (sometimes we will do it for free), get a mastering engineer to master a song and then compare the pro or semi-pro master with the automated masters. Whichever one you like best, go with it! Because this is really about your music and what will make you the most comfortable releasing your art into the public sphere.
