rtfm -- Realistically, The Free Motherlode of new-web music production services.
#πβsuno-school message I shared this comment earlier highlighting the 4 big sections that jump out specifically to me ; the AI stem-splitter (which rivals or bests Audacity + OpenVino), the fully featured Digital Audio Workspace, the professional-grade automastering (4 different styles so you can choose if you want your song to be bassy, punchy, crisp, etc), and finally the distribution service ( I use Distrokid for my releases, and haven't looked into their offering yet, but the fact that they're offering 80% royalty on a free account (you get to keep 100% on a paid plan, but for those asking for free alternatives to Distrokid, the g.o.a.t, this is the only respectable company that I've heard offering it so far). Really curious about the distribution side of things. The fact that they have AI generated song-starters (incredibly basic and limited, but STILL) makes me think that they'd be okay with distributing AI gen music, but not sure if they're more DistroKid or TuneCore in that regard.
The first album I worked on, I used Audacity for the main editing and effects like normalization, compression, trimming, whitespace, etc. On a few tracks that were worked on later, I brought the stems into BandLab's DAW to add neat pre-made pedal fx and whatnot. Afterward I ran them through the BandLab mastering to "finalize" the sound and make it sound "radio-ready".
Gotta love DistroKid for handling so much on that side -- creating the spotify, apple music, etc pages, getting all of that linked together. I try to avoid recommending paid services to avoid any improprieties and to avoid making people think it's spam or a paid ad, but legit they've handled so many things that I thought "were out of my reach", and for the $30/year drop in the bucket compared to what some of the services charge monthly, I almost feel like I need to champion both DistroKid's "modular paid options" and BandLab's entirely free unlimited suite (that has entirely option extra paid services that don't detract from the free service)