AAMS does a great job. If you are not a trained engineer, no matter if you use ozone and work a couple of days in one track, AAMS will ever deliver you a better master. Will AAMS deliver a pro master? No. Will it be a great master? Possibly no. Will it be a good alternative if I don’t have money or don’t want to spend money in a pro master by now? Hell yes. In the end of the day, the question is a balance between what you can do/ how much money you have/ how much time you have.

John Sense

AAMS works but it only improves on what you put it. Fair enough, but if it ONLY IMPROVES than why do they give you so many different preset / impulse thingies. If none of them have the ability to make a mix worse, I question their ability to make a mix better. Does that make sense?

Brandon Drury

Anyway to AAMS. Having tried it on a 'decent' mix (corrected in harbal) it did quite well, I'd say it actually surpassed myself 'pretend mastered' master from Wavelab in overall depth and involvement. However it wasn't perfect and did sound a tad overdone in some areas. Surely spending more time with the tool and disabling / toning down those components would help. I do like your advice on choosing the best mix for the album as the reference (either AAMS or manual) as I'd not read that before! And sure sometimes I have mixes that sound much better overall than others.

Polysix

Mix reviews,...guess every one into different style of sound, I been mixing and mastering for few years now, used tools like oZone, T-racks, and also individual vst such as waves, one thing I came across was that the quality of a mix is very important for AAMS to work, when you use a reference file or load one form "e.g. a Roadrunner CD." When you mastering manually you can hear frequencies and just cut em or raise them, however lets be logical AAMS just applies the reference setting from your source file to your mix. With my experience it works very well when applied to a mix with perfect levels on each track.... and that is what mastering is ment for!
AAMS is great for mastering purposes.

Ali

AAMS is ready to replace compare our highly skilled mastering engineers. It (or any similar product) probably never will be. But it has a value outstanding. I've used it, and had success with it. I even think it did a better job of mastering my band's album than our mastering engineer's first attempt (we were getting the album mastered at around the time I was trying AAMS out).

Rich

It takes time to get a good master even with some of the best plugins and monitors. AAMS will give you a great starting point, and is well worth the money for those on a budget or musicians do not have the time for mastering. In my opinion AAMS is very good A+.A few people on the net have made the comment on the length of time it takes to run the auto feature. Well AAMS is nothing compared to the amount of time it would have taken to do a mastered version of a song at the same quality AAMS software produces! Unless your some kind of mastering wizard you can't compare. What impressed me the most was how the auto feature applies compression. Either way if you like it or believe it or not AAMS is a great software!

Anthony Vincent

I am certainly no Mastering Engineer, but I have been involved in tracking and mixing for the last 18 years, and a musician for over 40 years. Presently, I, and my fellow musician friends just record for fun as a hobby. Although my long-time friend and musician and I are working on a CD of some of the old cover songs we did in the 60's and 70's for posterity's sake. Out of interest I downloaded this AAMS software (I haven't purchased yet) and have been running a couple of mixed cover songs I have completed through this software. I used an original copy of the song as a reference and was surprised at the results. To my ears it sounded pretty well balanced and good enough for our project. My point is, everyone on these Forums are recording music for many different reasons, some professional, some semi pro, and some just as a hobby. Of course a professional mastering engineer could do better, but for those of us who cannot afford, or justify the cost of a Pro these programs do provide a decent service. And, we can learn a lot about the mastering process. What can be wrong with that?

Actually think it`s does a fairly decent job . The only problem with it is finding the right reference track. We use it in our studio for our "budget" low cost recording to keep the cost down for our customers and so far people have been very happy with the results . Engineers are going to hate it that’s for sure, well most will . Personally it save a lot of time in our studio as we have a lot of clients that come in record a few songs to backing tracks and don`t have a lot of money to pay me by the hour to master them properly, so this is a great alternative option to a) save our clients’ money b) allows us to take on clients on a tight budget and c)doesn`t cost a huge amount of money to buy. Finally , as you can load it up with wavs and let it get on with it you can get on and do other things making it a very useful tool in our busy environment. P.s. One more thing to mention. If you master a track yourself ,using Wavelab or whatever you use ,that’s going on a certain album you can create a reference track from that and then use AAMS to master the rest of the album using that reference track and for that is works very well.

David

Our own masters were sometimes worse and sometimes better than the AAMS stuff. The guy who mastered for free did the best job, but only after his third attempt. All in all, I thought the AAMS might make a decent learning tool because you could change all of the settings yourself. That way you could look at what the AAMS was going to do, and preview it, and then change the settings of the EQ, compression, stereo width and so on. It was interesting to hear the effects of changes I made myself.

Van Speijk

Our band tried it out for our demo recordings, we also had a guy to master for us for free because he wanted to use some tracks for advertising his new studio and two of us tried our own hand at "mastering" so we had plenty of versions of the same songs to choose from. In the end the AAMS seemed to make "neat" masters, not much wrong.

Fox