A new online mastering service called SetMaster Pro is targeting a gap the bigger auto-mastering platforms (LANDR, eMastered and the rest) weren’t really built for: full DJ mixes, not single tracks.
Why does that matter? Well, the mastering tools you’ve probably heard of are built around a single piece of music: a producer’s finished song, processed as one thing. A DJ mix is different. It’s many tracks recorded continuously, pulled from wildly different sources, each at its own loudness and tonal shape. Master that the way you’d master a single track, and the quiet records in the middle of your set stay quiet while the loud ones get squashed.
SetMaster Pro is built to fix that problem. You upload a continuous mix, pick one of four mastering profiles (Streaming, Club, Podcast or Warm Analogue), and download a finished file a few minutes later. The Streaming profile aims at -14 LUFS, the normalisation target SoundCloud, Mixcloud, Spotify and Apple Music all use. Club pushes harder for that big-room playback feel. Pro and Studio subscribers can also publish straight to SoundCloud and Mixcloud from inside the app.
How it handles the level problem
I put this question directly to founder John Roberts when I first looked at the tool, because it’s the question I know our audience will want the answer to.
His answer: the system runs a lookahead pass across the whole mix to establish a loudness baseline, then uses a slow-moving automatic gain control (sliding over a three-second window) to gradually ride the gain up on quieter sections without the pumping you’d get from fast compression. After that come the standard multi-band compression, EQ and true-peak limiting stages, tuned to whichever profile you picked.
John has since added that explanation to the SetMaster Pro documentation following our conversation. Note too that AI is not used at all with this tool.
Pricing and availability
SetMaster Pro is live now at setmasterpro.com. A free tier gives you one master per month with an audio watermark (ie just for testing); Pro is £4.99 a month for four mixes; Studio Lite £9.99 for 15; Studio £24.99 for 50 mixes and a 5GB file ceiling. Annual billing knocks 17% off. Whether the paid tiers earn their keep is something I’ll be testing in a full review soon – hold on for that.
Worth knowing about too: there’s a separate free in-browser DJ mix analyser on the same site. Drop a mix into the page and it reports back on loudness, true peak, dynamic range, stereo width and tonal balance, all measured to broadcast spec. Nothing actually uploads, the analysis runs in your browser. Useful whether or not you ever touch the paid product.
First Thoughts
The category needed a dedicated DJ mix tool, and on paper SetMaster Pro looks like the most serious attempt yet. The level-balancing approach is the right shape of solution, and the four-profile choice covers most of where DJ mixes actually end up.
If your finished DJ mixes just don’t sound like the ones you’re emulating, mastering is probably the issue, which is why we spend plenty of time in our Pro Mixtape Formula course, giving you simple ways of doing it. That’s why I’m so excited to play with this tool because it could make it simpler still. As I say watch out for that review.
