Paddy power.

Apple’s iPad has long had a suite of music creation tools at its disposal, from a portable version of Garageband to a plethora of software synthesizers and drum machines, but until this point it’s never had anything to actually work on your sounds post-composition. Igor Vasiliev has remedied this with his new app Audio Mastering, and it looks to do exactly what it says on the tin.

Mastering is a dark art, and at its highest level there’s a never-ending pit of shiny things for you to re-mortgage for, so let’s just put those ideas to one side for a minute. This is a $9.99 piece of iPad software so it has very likely been made with the assumption that you’re probably not going to be plugging it into a nice pair of Genelec monitors. With that in mind, the app does indeed offer a handful of options to transform flat demo mixes into tracks with just a little more pizzazz and playability.

If you remember the old EQ units you used to get with stereo separates or on a car stereo then the functions should look pretty familiar; there’s a selection of bands allowing you to EQ your selected waveform, a loudness maximizer which adds some light compression by increasing the loudness while lowering the dynamic range, and most interestingly a harmonic saturator and stereo imaging tool.

It’s quite a long way from a real mastering studio without proper limiting and multi-band compression for sure, but like we mentioned earlier it’s clearly not being marketed for that kind of usage. For a quick, reliable and easy boost, not to mention the file conversion utility the app offers, we’d say it looks like a step in the right direction. [via Resident Advisor]