Streamlined Mastering Approvals with Samply
Introducing Samply: The Ultimate Mastering Approval Tool
Your mastering project will be delivered for approval using a relatively new service called Samply. The team at Samply have created an amazing tool for mastering project approvals because their audio player was created for mastering engineers, with A LOT of input and feedback from busy mastering engineers.
Tailored for Mastering Studios: Essential Features
Mastering studios have a different set of needs compared to mixing engineers and producers when it comes to sharing projects for approval because the audio player needs to have gapless playback allowing you to hear the exact transitions between songs where there is X amount of space between songs, or for cases when songs overlap or crossfade. The player needs to play from one song to the next with perfect accuracy and no buffering so you can confidently evaluate every detail of your master. Samply does this.
Full-Resolution Audio Playback and Metadata Display
The Samply audio player also plays audio in full-resolution as opposed to services like Dropbox and Soundcloud which can drastically degrade the audio quality when streaming audio from their website or app, which is obviously not good for mastering approvals.
Basically, the Samply audio player looks and feels like a great modern streaming service and displays the full metadata & song titles in a very clean manner as opposed to just showing you the often ugly file names, and it can even display the artwork for your release if you’ve sent it. It’s a great way to experience the mastered version of your project to ensure that it’s 100% ready for release, or if any changes may still be needed.
When you receive your master for approval, you or anybody involved with the project can listen to and approve the master in any web browser on any device (mobile, desktop, tablet, etc.) but to take advantage of some features such as “Offline Listening” you may want to pre-install the Samply iOS app which can be found HERE. At this time there is no Android version.
Leveraging the Samply iOS App for Offline Listening
By using the Samply iOS app, you can listen to your master while in “Airplane Mode” or simply have it downloaded your master to your device so it doesn’t rely upon streaming the audio when listening, which can be helpful for those on slower networks or if you plan to be in an area with no cell/data service.
You can of course download the files from Samply via the web version to listen to the files in your audio software of choice but the Samply web-player and iOS app make a great place for most users to listen to their mastered project for approval on basically any device, without some of the pitfalls that services like Dropbox, Google Drive, WeTransfer, Fidbak, SoundCloud, and others are prone to.
Some consumer media players can also add extra space between the songs and do other unexpected things that induce errors or issues that aren’t actually present in your mastered project, so the Samply audio player is really designed to be a simple and foolproof place to approve your mastering project.
Simplified Approval Process with Samply
Once the mastering is approved, you’ll receive a separate email to download all the various master formats of your project. Samply is just used as an approval tool and not for final delivery of master files.
You can also use the Samply player to share your project with friends, family, and for promo use prior to the official release of your project as it’s just a great way to easily listen to your project in a way that both looks and sounds professional.