MUMBAI: UK's Mastering World and Indian pro audio webstore- Sudeep Audio have joined hands to bring an e-commerce, cloud-based suite of business tools, designed primarily for freelance sound engineers in the country. The product, called Audio-Pro, will aim to develop and create an online platform for its users, the current target being audio production masters.

Founder of Mastering World Donal Whelan explained, "We have always felt connected to the Indian market and decided to go ahead with it when Aditya Mehta of Sudeep Audio mentioned that he was looking to do something similar."

"We have plans to launch it in the rest of the world, but India was an obvious choice. This country has a lot of talented and professional sound engineers, and we have heard a lot of music coming from India which is of high quality. I am very impressed with the standard of recording but when it comes to us mastering engineers, we are disorganised and cannot market ourselves well. That is where Audio-Pro comes into the picture," he added.

Whelan explained that the first principle of the service is to allow engineers to market themselves and showcase all their work on one website. This will help employers find their portfolio easily, which will be professionally well packaged. The second principle is to give engineers' work more professionalism through tools that help their clients make payments online. It will unify all the administrative things while sending their work and establishing themselves as brands on the website.

Users can upload their work – music, photos, projects, clients, testimonials, advertise their rates and match existing branding and colours, on the site. It also offers news and blog publishing options, and with social media integration, users can post stories instantly to Facebook, Twitter or Google+.

Whelan said, "We have put in a lot of work to make the dashboard and all the tools very simple for engineers to use and it is very easy to register. Moreover, the subscription costs are reasonable and there is also an Indian discount of 30 per cent for users who wish to sign up. Right now, we have also introduced a thirty day free trial with no obligation. We really hope people try it out, like it and then subscribe for it at the end of the thirty day period."

There are two types of subscriptions – Basic and Plus Editions, which are offered at different rates of ?10 and ?30 per month respectively.

"It is about empowering sound engineers to work better and get more work. I would love to see lots of mastering engineers on it and maybe producers and directors in the future. Right now, our target audience is the freelance engineer. Hopefully, in the future, we will adapt and modify the website to cater to other professionals in the creative industry. However, the expansion plan is sideways expansion," Whelan added.