Within about 15 seconds of making these selections and playing the track, Ozone had chained together a selection of EQs, compressors and limiters that added punch, clarity and, of course, loudness. I was asked to choose between the Vintage and Modern setting, select either a manual EQ setting or load a mastered song for reference and then tell Ozone whether the track was being mastered for streaming or CD. I loaded my song into the standalone app and analyzed it with the Master Assistant feature. Ozone has deeply integrated machine learning and I immediately found that the program lives up to the hype surrounding that technology. Note the colored lines beneath the waveform, which accurately depict the song’s structure. The Master Assistant feature helps create a starting point on your master. However, that didn’t stop me from loading a recent mix into Ozone and taking a crack at mastering it. Full disclosure My mastering experience prior to this review comprised loading up an instance of Waves Abbey Road TG Mastering Chain, applying a preset and playing with the settings from there. Since Ozone is primarily (though by no means solely) aimed at mastering engineers, the plugin features a host of options for manipulating a finished stereo mix, with all elements in place and no stems to adjust. It features a series of EQ, compression, saturation and limiting modules meant to be used in a mastering chain - putting the final touches on your audio before it hits streaming platforms or physical media.

Ozone is first and foremost a mastering suite. But, in addition to being an engineer, I am also a musician, so I was excited to try out the Ozone suite for myself. I have always been impressed by RX’s ability to improve poor location sound but was unfamiliar with the company’s more music-focused products.

The company has been on my radar for a number of years now, having used the RX suite extensively for clean up and restoration of production audio. And with it, iZotope hopes to provide a comprehensive package of tools to streamline the audio engineer’s workflow. Izotope is back with its latest release, Ozone 9.

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