Sorry - I explained badly. Mastering is to do with listening, and tweaking TINY details. Your snag is that you can't hear them for two reasons - your equipment cannot reveal them, and you don't yet have the ear training you need. The plug in is not helping your mixes - and in fairness, they rarely do without you leaping in and adjusting what the plug in does. They're not ever plug in and play - otherwise why would any one pay a real mastering engineer. In real terms it's like you want to take out somebodies appendix and have watched the you tube operation. You don't have the tools, but do have a magnifying glass and a pair of wire cutters - plus Bert Weedon's operate in a day plug in to hold the cutters for you, and snip where 90% of the surgeons snip.
It really is that basic. Why would you pay LANDR for the wav capable version when it clearly isn't working on the mp3? It will give you higher quality mush.
Distortion is not all the same - AC/DC distortion, or thrash metal distortion, or 1970s tube distortion? Distortion comes in so many varieties - some nice and appropriate and some not.
I'm not sure I can pick the two versions apart in any meaningful way. Both have very light bass? The introduction of the first distorted section works pretty well, but again, it took me a while to settle to the new tempo - but around 2 minutes the thing breaks up into mush - it's just a noise. No idea what chords are playing, what the individual rhythms are and even worse - the out of tune guitar really grates. One note flat right from the start, and a repeated one, that just kind of gnaws away at you and gets in the way. I wondered if it was having decent monitors, so I tried it in the office on good but small RCFs - very nice speakers above about 60Hz, but rolled off below and they actually sound worse on the thrashing messy section than my big ones in the studio.
So I looked at the audio - wow! It's squashed to the point of craziness. Both versions are also exactly the same as far as I can tell? What on earth did you do?
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