Manual / Analyzer

Finalizer

Analyzer

Introduction to the online Analyzer

Welcome to the manual for the Free Finalizer Analyzer! Whether you are a mastering champion or a total rookie, this online tool is super helpful for comparing your own music to well-known, professionally mastered tracks.

If you haven’t already created a free account, you should do that right away, so you can go back and forth between this manual and the Free Finalizer Analyzer.

To put a few words on what the Analyzer does, it is an easy-to-use, comparative tool that gives you valuable information about how your own music projects stack up to popular tracks you know and love – at least in terms of how they are mastered.

So, what tracks can you compare your own tracks to? Well, we have created comprehensive lists in five different categories:

  • Music genres investigated
  • All times popular
  • Top sales
  • Streaming services investigated
  • TC compiled list
 

Music genres investigated is created with genre comparison in mind. The list is ideal for testing whether your own music has been mastered in a way that can be considered “genre appropriate”.

All times popular contains entire albums that are widely considered classics – for example Adele’s 21 and Michael Jackson’s Thriller. Going through the list, you will see how tracks from the same album often have similar sound qualities – in other words, they are often “mastered in roughly the same way”.

Top sales is, of course, an ongoing list. It is based on the Billboard charts and will be continuously updated every 3 months.

Streaming services investigated makes it possible to compare how songs differ across streaming services like iTunes, Spotify etc. A set of fixed songs have been chosen and they are found and analyzed from each of the investigated services. By making an A/B-comparison between two different services, the sound difference becomes quite clear. We have also included CD-versions of the songs for comparison.

TC compiled list is perfect for illustrating spectral, loudness and compression differences across instruments, music genres, technical signals – and in a historical context. For example, you can see how the Loudness War has left its mark on the last 60 years of popular music.

The Meters

The Free Analyzer gives you access to three types of meters: The Loudness Radar, the Compres-O-Meter and the Spectr-O-Meter. 
Although they are based on technically complex algorithms, they can be easily interpreted, if you know what to look for.