Curious if anyone else has used the Dolby mastering feature on SoundCloud Pro? I’ve sampled it a couple of times on two of my pieces, but honestly, my own mastering sounded better than this feature, which OF COURSE seems geared toward pop/EDM/hip-hop style music and not toward orchestral based music.
That being said, I went back to and old track I have on my SoundCloud page, which is a darker, cinematic action piece, that I had so much trouble mixing. I used Cinematic Studio Strings and Brass originally, and then went back an added CS Woodwinds and some different percussion libraries, mainly Soundiron’s Apocalypse Percussion in place of NI’s Action Strikes. The problem I found was CSS and Action Strikes were always muddy sounding no matter what I did.
I did a bit of remixing and then decided to try the Dolby mastering feature to see what I could get. This time I found that it actually made the mix sound much better than expected. The instruments received better separation in the mix, with the exception of the timpani, which actually got lost, but there’s still a bit too much mud in my opinion.
What do you think? Would you use this feature? Any advice to help get that darker, muddy sound to clean up?