The Best Music Mastering Services in 2026, Compared on What You Actually Get

Short answer: most "free" mastering is a preview you cannot download. LANDR, eMastered and Masterchannel all let you hear a master for nothing and then ask for money before you can keep the file. Only three services here give you a real, keepable master at no cost: BandLab (unlimited WAV and MP3, account required), AI Mastering by Bakuage (unlimited, free, account required), and TrackGleam (unlimited, no account, and nothing is uploaded). If you master a handful of songs a year, per-track pricing beats every subscription on this page. All prices below were read from each vendor's own pricing page on 19 August 2026.

Disclosure: TrackGleam is one of the nine, and we make it. Every competitor figure below is dated so you can check it, and we have flagged the cases where a rival beats us.

The comparison table

Prices change with promotions, and several of these vendors run permanent "sale" pricing. Treat the numbers as of 19 August 2026 and check the vendor page before you buy.

CloudBounce, which still appears in most 2026 "best of" lists, is gone — see below.

The one thing to understand: "free" usually means "listen, do not touch"

This is the single biggest source of frustration with AI mastering, and it is easy to miss until you have spent twenty minutes on a track. The dominant business model is free preview, paid download. You upload your mix, the service masters it, you play it back and it sounds noticeably better than what you started with — and then the download button asks for a card.

eMastered says it plainly on their own homepage: master and preview unlimited tracks for free, and pay when you are ready to download. LANDR's pricing page offers to let you hear your track mastered next to a "Buy 1 WAV master" button. Masterchannel's terms of service go further and describe preview output as watermarked and licensed for evaluation only. None of this is dishonest — it is stated up front by all three — but if you assumed "free mastering" meant a file you could upload to Spotify, that is the gap.

The services that genuinely hand you a finished file for nothing are the exception, and there are three of them on this page.

The genuinely free options

BandLab Mastering is the most generous free offer in the market and deserves more credit than most comparison articles give it. BandLab's own help centre states you get unlimited WAV and MP3 downloads of your mastered tracks. Their documentation does not mention a watermark, and none is widely reported, but the wording we could verify covers the downloads rather than explicitly promising no watermark. The trade-offs are that you need a BandLab account and your audio is uploaded to their servers. If you already use BandLab, there is very little reason to pay anyone else for a basic master.

AI Mastering (aimastering.com, from Bakuage in Japan) is the quiet one. It has a single plan, it is free, and mastering is unlimited. It is less polished than the big commercial names and it requires an account and an upload, but the price is real.

TrackGleam — this site — takes the third approach: the mastering runs inside your browser, so there is no account, no upload, and no queue. Every master you download is a finished file with no watermark, whether you pay or not. The paid layer is a per-track option rather than a gate on the free result, which we cover honestly further down.

Service by service

LANDR

The best-known name, and the most complete ecosystem: mastering sits inside a bundle with distribution, samples and plugins. Studio Essentials is $99/year, Standard $144/year and Pro $192/year when billed annually; monthly billing costs more. Uniquely among the subscription services, LANDR kept a pay-per-track option — around $10 for a single WAV — which matters if you release twice a year. Outputs are 320 kbps MP3, 16-bit WAV at 44.1 kHz, or 24-bit HD WAV. Their mastering plugin processes inside your DAW without uploading, which is the strongest privacy option of any paid service here.

eMastered

Founded with Grammy-winning engineers attached, and a genuinely good-sounding service. It is subscription-only: $15/month if you pay $180 upfront for the year, $19/month on a yearly commitment billed monthly, or $39/month if you want to cancel any time. There is no pay-per-track. Read the middle option carefully — eMastered's pricing page and help centre both describe it as a commitment to a full year paid in monthly instalments. Their terms do let you cancel before a renewal date, but payments already made are non-refundable and there are no credits for partly used periods, so that plan is effectively priced as a year. HD WAV output goes up to 96 kHz.

Masterchannel

A newer AI service with no free tier at all: Artist is $180/year, Professional $228/year, Partner $948/year. Output is WAV only, matched to the resolution you uploaded. Their terms are unusually clear that uploaded files remain entirely yours, which is worth noting in a market where that is not always spelled out.

MasteringBOX

Cheap and flexible, with a free tier of one master per day — but the real constraint is format, not count. Free and the Basic tier ($7.99/month, or $5/month billed yearly) deliver MP3 and M4A only; on the subscription plans WAV requires Pro ($12.99/month, or $8/month billed yearly), which caps WAV at three per month. MasteringBOX has also sold one-off per-track masters in the past, so check in the app before assuming a subscription is the only route to a WAV. Worth knowing before you commit: their data policy says they store your uploads and analyse them for measurements such as loudness, frequency balance and style, and that this collected information is used to improve the service. That is measurements rather than your audio, but it is more than some rivals claim — Masterchannel's terms, for instance, state flatly that they will not use your files to train or improve their AI models.

iZotope Ozone

Not a service at all — a plugin you buy once and own, with an AI assistant that suggests a starting chain you can then take apart. It is the right answer if you want to learn mastering rather than outsource it, and the wrong answer if you want a finished file in two minutes. We wrote a longer piece on whether you need Ozone.

A human mastering engineer

Still the best outcome for a record that matters, and no automated service on this page will tell you your snare is too loud or that the second chorus needs to open up. Expect roughly $50–$150 per track at the indie end, more for established engineers, with a day or more of turnaround and revision rounds included. For an album, see our breakdown of album mastering costs in 2026.

CloudBounce is gone (and most 2026 lists still recommend it)

If you have been comparing services, you have almost certainly seen CloudBounce ranked in a "best of 2026" list. It is no longer operating — the site is unreachable, and CD Baby, which resold CloudBounce mastering, ended that partnership in February 2025. Image-Line's FL Cloud Mastering is the closest successor if you are in the FL Studio world.

We mention it because it is a useful test of any comparison article you read, including this one: if a page recommends a service that shut down, nobody checked. Every price on this page was read from the vendor's own site on 19 August 2026.

Which one should you actually pick?

• You release a few songs a year. Subscriptions are poor value — you will pay $180 for a service you touch four times. Use a free option, or per-track pricing.
• You release constantly. A subscription starts to make sense. eMastered at $15/month on annual billing or LANDR Studio Standard at $144/year — the cheapest LANDR tier that actually includes WAV masters — are the two to weigh, and LANDR wins if you also want distribution.
• You care about privacy, or your audio is unreleased. Anything cloud-based means uploading unreleased music to a third party. Browser-based mastering and LANDR's DAW plugin are the two ways to avoid that.
• You are on a phone with no budget. BandLab if you do not mind making an account; TrackGleam if you do.
• The song genuinely matters. Hire a human. Nothing here replaces judgment.

Where TrackGleam fits, honestly

We built this site, so treat this section with the scepticism it deserves — here is what is specifically, checkably different rather than a claim about sound quality, which you should judge with your own ears.

Nothing is uploaded. The entire 14-stage chain runs in your browser using Web Audio. Your unreleased mix never touches a server, there is no queue, and there is no account to create. The free master makes no network call at all. For the optional GleamAI version, numeric measurements — loudness, tone balance, stereo profile — are sent to choose the settings; the audio itself still never leaves your device. Every other service on this page except the Ozone and LANDR plugins requires you to hand over the file.

The free master is a real, finished file. Unlimited tracks, WAV or 320 kbps MP3, and no watermark on anything you download — free or paid. There is one audible watermark in the product and it is worth being precise about: if you audition the optional GleamAI version without buying it, a soft chime plays every twelve seconds during playback. It exists only in that preview, and it is never present in a file you download.

Paying is per track, not per month. GleamAI is $1.99 for one master, $5 for ten, or $8.99/month if you are working constantly. It adds a track-specific recipe and four processors the free chain never runs — a linear-phase finishing EQ, spectral resonance smoothing, a clarity rider and correlation-controlled stereo width — plus a two-pass render. It is a different, more tailored take on your track, not automatically a better one, and both downloads land at the same loudness, so what you are paying for is tonal decisions rather than volume. On phones the in-page preview can play about a decibel quieter than the file you download, so level-match before you judge it.

The honest limitation: for a one-off basic master with no privacy concerns, BandLab's free tier is a completely reasonable choice and costs the same as ours. We are the better fit when you do not want to upload, do not want an account, or want to pay two dollars once instead of subscribing.

Everything is measured against real standards rather than vibes: true peak is calculated to ITU-R BS.1770-4 with the same 4× oversampling the limiter uses, and masters land at a −1.0 dBTP ceiling. If you want the background, start with LUFS streaming targets or how AI mastering actually works.

Master a track free — no signup, nothing uploads