The 60-Second Diagnostic That Changes How You Master Every AI Track
Most people open Reaper and go straight to the plugins. Don’t be that person.
Before you touch ReaEQ. Before you add a single band. Before you reach for the compressor…you need to know what's actually wrong with the track. Because the processing decisions you make in the next hour flow entirely from the answer to that question.
Here's the diagnostic. Four checks. Sixty seconds. Run this on every AI export before you do anything else.
Check 1: Listen for low-mid haze.
Jump to the chorus — the loudest, fullest section of the track. Focus on the vocals. Do they cut through cleanly or do they feel buried in a cloud? Does the mix feel open or slightly muffled?
If it feels cloudy, you have low-mid buildup. It lives between 250 and 500 Hz and it comes from the AI stacking multiple harmonic layers simultaneously. Your first ReaEQ move will be a cut in that range.
Check 2: Listen for metallic shimmer.
Focus on the cymbals and the consonants in the vocals — the S sounds, the T sounds, the hard edges. Is there a ringing, fatiguing quality? Does the track feel tiring to listen to at moderate volume?
If yes, you have upper-mid artifacts. They live around 5 to 8 kHz. This is the clearest tell of an unmastered AI track and one of the most common findings across every project I've worked on.
Check 3: Jump to the final ten seconds.
Let the music fade. Listen carefully to what's left in the silence after the instruments drop away. Is there a clean decay into silence — or is there something else there? A faint granular texture. A shimmer that doesn't belong to the music.
That's the synthetic noise floor. It happens when the generative model runs out of musical material and fills the remaining space with predicted harmonic content. It needs ReaFIR treatment — applied surgically to the tail only, not the full track.
Check 4: Run the Dry Run before anything else.
Before you think about loudness targeting, go to File → Render and click Dry Run at the bottom of the dialog. Reaper processes your entire project in about one second and gives you the full scorecard — Peak, Clips, LUFS-I, LUFS-S, and LRA — without creating a single file.
This is faster than inserting the loudness meter and playing the full track in real time. You get every number you need in one second flat.
Here's what to look for:
Peak should be at -1.0 dBTP or below. If it's at 0.0 or above, your limiter ceiling isn't holding.
Clips should be zero. Any number above zero means digital distortion in the output.
LUFS-I is your integrated loudness. Spotify targets -14. Apple Music targets -16. Note the gap between where you are and where you need to be — that tells you how hard ReaLimit needs to work.
LRA is your loudness range. Below 3 means the source is already heavily compressed and dynamically flat. Above 14 means significant dynamic variation that needs managing. Most genres sit comfortably between 5 and 10.
Run the Dry Run first. Know your numbers before you build the chain.
That's the whole diagnostic.
Four checks. Sixty seconds. And now you know exactly what you're fixing before you open a single plugin.
Low-mid haze — ReaEQ cut around 320 Hz. Metallic shimmer — ReaEQ cut around 2.7 kHz, dynamic control with ReaXcomp if needed. Synthetic noise floor — ReaFIR as Item FX on the tail only. Loudness gap — ReaLimit to streaming targets, ceiling at -1.0 dBTP.
The processing decisions write themselves once you know what you're solving for. The mistake most people make is reaching for the tools before they know what the problem is — and ending up with a chain that sounds busy without sounding better.
Ears first. Plugins second.
If you want the full mastering chain — every plugin, every setting, the complete step-by-step workflow — that's exactly what Unlock Reaper: Mastering AI Music covers. It's $8.99 at jgbeatslab.com, and it's already in your library if you're a Red Lab Access member.
