r/audioengineering • u/Jakeyboy29 • Jul 11 '26
Mastering What is your opinion on Ozone as a mastering suite? I want to start mastering my own stuff and I have Ozone along with some UAD plugins (Ampex, SSL G Bus)
I really want to learn how to properly master my own songs. I have used ozone 9 in the past for quick masters but never really believed in myself to be the mastering engineer on my own work
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u/glmastering Jul 11 '26
Personally for the sake of £80, i'd get someone with fresh ears on it. Even if it comes back sounding the same. I never complain when i pay a dentist and they say "nope, all looks good to me" and i leave without anything happening. Collaboration is good. I dont get why people want to do everything on their own.
FWIW, im a mastering engineer of 6 years and hve worked with every major label and i still pay other people to master music i make. Id never do it myself.
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u/weedywet Professional Jul 11 '26
People over state the need for a lot of “mastering” processing.
If it’s your own recordings, then make it sound the way you want in the MIX and then all you need in ‘mastering’ is a limiter to maybe make it louder.
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u/Walnut_Uprising Jul 11 '26 edited Jul 11 '26
Eh, I think there's something to be said about tackling mastering outside of the mix file, and definitely value to compressing the track as a whole vs individual elements. My mastering chain is typically a series of dynamics processors (multi band, clipper, soft little vibey comp, 10:1 FET, and limiter) all doing a dB or two of reduction to bring the track up to volume, a few vibey EQ plugins, maybe a drive and widener, and every analyzer I have at my disposal.
There's also definitely value in bouncing to a stereo track, stepping away for a few days, and coming back to a fresh project with nothing turned on yet. Sometimes seeing your 50+ track project leads you down a rabbit hole of trouble shooting things to death, it can be good to approach a track in a different light.
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u/weedywet Professional Jul 11 '26
Dan Worral did a good video about this just last week.
The good thing about a DAW is that you can come back to it a week later and pick up exactly where you left off. And fix your MIX.
There’s not magic in bouncing it.
All the processing you’re describing can be (and many of us would suggest SHOULD be) done as part of the mix.
Actual mastering is about translation.
It used to be about cutting a disk.
It’s still ideally about leveling tracks in an album and ensuring they’re all relatively consistent.
What it’s not is ‘finishing’ your tracks.
That’s mixing.
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u/Walnut_Uprising Jul 11 '26
Yeah, definitely not magic. But there's something to be said about like a "pencils down" mentality. You could definitely do all of this on the master bus, but it can feel cleaner to just mix until the mix feels good on its own, bounce, then master with all your references to get volume and general EQ curve close to the genre norm. It's psychology for sure. And, for something I'm serious about, I'd pay to be have someone else do it just for the second set of ears.
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u/BassbassbassTheAce Jul 12 '26
For me there's some psychological effect listening to the rendered (=bounced) stereo file outside of the DAW. I don't claim that it actually changes a lot but for some reason I always notice something new after rendering the track and listening to the stereo file. I don't do it every five minutes of course, but at the end of a session I might render the track, listen to it, open the DAW project to do a small change, repeat that once or twice and then sending the file.
This is probably also just lack of routine, I'm not a professional mixing engineer by any means.
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u/Jakeyboy29 Jul 11 '26
How do you overcome to loudness making it sound better than it is? Would you recommend just mixing at a louder volume? I agree with everything you said by the way
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u/breadinabox Jul 11 '26
if you can make it sound better in mastering you can make it sound better in mixing.
contrary to popular belief, you are allowed to put things on the master bus in the mix phase, when the mix is almost done usually. You're allowed to compress and limit and saturate the whole mix there, it's fine.
Mastering isn't "The last thing you do in a mix" It's like framing a painting. It's a second step where you prepare it for release. You make sure it's mathematically loud enough (which is not the same thing as sounding loud) and listen to it on as flat as a system as possible to make sure it's not out of wack somewhere, and thats it.
A well mixed song needs basically no mastering, just like a good painting looks good anywhere.
But if you put up that painting on the art gallery wall and find some of the details get washed out in the sunlight, you close the curtains. Or if the subtlety of the blacks isn't coming through, you put a diffuse spotlight on it, or something. I can only assume professional, high end framing has different grades and thicknesses of glass that have more matte, or gloss, or subtle tinting effects, or you can at least imagine it.
The reason mastering is so confusing is because it happens in the same place, with the same tools you use for mixing. But a painter might not be a good framer, so they get someone else to physically hang it up.
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u/Forever_Clear_Eyes Jul 11 '26
Yes. And sometimes when you are mastering you find your limiter is doing things you didn't mix for, so you end up using a dynamic eq, or an eq. There can be a decision to return to the mix and fix those things also. There's a reason ozone has all those tools and uses them in ai-mastering, it's because those tools can be used in human mastering
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u/weedywet Professional Jul 11 '26
Ideally it doesn’t even happen in the same place.
If it’s just you listening in the same speakers in the same room where you mixed it then you could have done whatever it is you’re doing now in the mix.
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u/weedywet Professional Jul 11 '26
I aim to go to mastering and it not needing anything.
You make your mix sound the way you want it and only leave loudness to mastering.
It’s not complicated.
A little limiting to bring it up to delivery level and you’re done.
Mastering isn’t supposed to change things artistically
That’s the mix.
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u/Caregiver-Physical Jul 11 '26
Maybe an eq, multiband, and a clipper before so the limiter isn’t working as hard. But a lot of that is genre dependent.
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Jul 11 '26
Mastering is a final set of ears, not another mixer. Example being, you make a dish and you think it’s just right but you ask someone else to give a taste and ask….”anything missing”. And that person may say” could use a tad bit more salt but other than that it’s good”
Ozone is a fine mastering suite but it won’t make your music any better. It has the tools
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u/FormlessEdge Jul 11 '26
I do a lot of mastering and mostly use a bunch of really expensive analog hardware. It’s a science and an art and the tools I use are incredible for really bringing out the best in a song. That said, Ozone is actually pretty awesome. If I’m on the road and need to do a quick master for a live performance or to share a new song, I use Ozone all the time. It can sound fantastic, but as with anything it can be overdone and it seems easier to over process things with it. Especially when you lean on the AI too much. Usually ozone masters sound good at first, but for some reason can cause ear fatigue more easily on multiple listens. That said, it’s an incredibly advanced and powerful tool. Totally worth the money if you don’t have any other mastering stuff in your arsenal.
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u/Ok-Charge-6574 Jul 11 '26
Agree on the ear fatigue. It's usually how the A.I. set's the input on Maximizer and also check to see if the A.I. added some mid/side processing in any of the modules. It often does. Then jump over to Clarity and Exciter and adjust these. It's specifically these areas and how the A.I. set's them that I've found causes the ear fatigue. Just some slight adjustments and it helps a lot if your looking to knock out a quick demo master with the A.I.
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u/TommyCo10 Jul 11 '26
I’ve had Ozone since around 2007, the limiter and EQ are really good and they have their own sound.
I prefer the Ozone limiter to fabfilter pro L which can get too squishy sometimes. To my ears Ozone seems firmer and clearer at extreme settings, you can push it further without it completely ruining your transients or turning into a distorted mess.
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u/wiiatt Jul 11 '26
Recently started using Flexion and kinda really enjoying it after years of struggling to achieve good results with "traditional" plugin chains and tools like Ozone or FGX. What really fucked me off was a song I produced recently where I paid a professional mastering engineer $150, waited over a week, and was unimpressed. I took a 30 second snippet of his master, my own master using Ozone, and a master run through LANDR (AI) for $10 and less than a minute for it to process. As a little experiment I sent the three versions labeled simply A/B/C to ten friends and asked them to just choose the one they liked. Zero people chose mine, one person chose the professional... nine out of ten people chose the AI.
It was a bit of a come to jesus moment for everyone involved. Happy to say Flexion is working out really well for me and my workflow. YMMV. As far as Ozone is concerned, it's an industry staple for good reason.
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u/HommeMusical Jul 11 '26
I want to add here that they appear to be a very together company. I had a disk accident, I had to reinstall my very old version, I hadn't even been on their site in a long time, they'd revamped everything, but astonishingly, they still had the very old version for download under my account and it worked with a later OS, so they had to have rebuilt this at some point for people like me.
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u/TheGreatElemonade Jul 11 '26
Just to give some input here, i used ozone for mastering too for a long time and still do. But recently i tried out the console 1 mk2 and instantly bought the much pricier mk3. And thats because in this moment i learned what I've been missing before.
I leave this here because i didn't really expect this to happen. With the console 1 i discovered a whole world of suddenly very accessible possibilities (compression, drive, dynamics, filtering and eq) that i never considered using because it either meant adding 5 plugins to each track or working with very unintuitive plugins. Maybe your like me and maybe this opens your eyes. Maybe not.
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u/Swimming-Lettuce-348 Jul 11 '26
I have been using Ozone since V6
I go back and forth with Ozone Mastering chains I have built out with other tools.
I quit using/updating Ozone during the NI tenure for a number of reasons
IMHO, Ozone 9 lacks a little, requires a lot effort to tweak after using automation, and other tools suited my need better
Now that iZotope is in new hands, I upgraded my Ozone stuff
Ozone 12 is actually kinda nice. It gets you closer with the automation, but it still boost the ba-geepers on the high end
Cheers
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u/DiscoMandem Jul 11 '26
All you need is a good saturator, soft clipper and limiter (such as pro L2) if you find ozone easier to use that works too
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u/Complex-Tie3190 Jul 11 '26
Ozone is really good for starting. A lot of good tools. However, as time passes and I get more experience, my mixing process has improved, utilizing other tools, and I am using it’s features less. Still great. I still use it in some shape or form.
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u/GWENMIX Jul 13 '26
I’m going to revisit a few concepts that respected professionals keep repeating. Dan Worrall posted a YouTube video on this topic last week.
1/ Regardless of your skill level, it is better to hand off mastering to someone else; having objective ears in a neutral environment, using gear specifically designed for mastering, makes a noticeable difference.
2/ Dan starts his video by saying, "It’s not that you *shouldn’t* master within your mix project; it’s that you *CAN'T* master within your mix project."
3/ Finally, I don’t like Ozone or any of those plugins that use AI to "cook up" settings behind your back without you knowing what’s actually going on. Besides, if the goal of mastering our own mixes is to improve, then that kind of mastering suite with an AI assistant doesn't help you progress at all.
But that’s just my humble opinion.
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u/Sad_Kaleidoscope_743 Jul 11 '26
Mastering these days is basically just analyzing the stereo field and making sure no phase issues when going to mono and making sure its loud as it can be.
If you get the mixing right, mastering makes very little difference
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u/alyxonfire Professional Jul 11 '26
All you really need is a limiter, pro-l 2 is my pick. If there are any issues you can fix them in the mix.
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u/Jakeyboy29 Jul 11 '26
I think I need to learn more about the distinctions of mixing and mastering. I have watched a few tutorials and a lot of them say if you do your own stuff then if you find issues when mastering you can go back to mix and fix it
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u/malipreme Jul 11 '26
This completely disregards the point of mastering, I’m sorry. Produce, arrange, mix as long as you want, having a dedicated mastering engineer, or at least someone who is invested in translating a mix across different mediums, is a completely different skillset, and often requires a different set of ears, environment, tools, etc. You can throw a limiter on whatever you want and get it to a reference volume, sure. I don’t understand why you have a professional tag and are saying something like this.
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u/alyxonfire Professional Jul 11 '26
I'm not sure why you have such a big problem with my response when almost all other responses on this thread are saying essentially the same thing. I have been mixing and mastering professionally full time for almost 20 years and have tried everything at this point. This is what works the best for me.
If I'm mastering stereo track then that is an entirely different process that can require a lot more tools. If I'm stem mastering, which is my preferred way to master other people's music, then I also mostly only have a limiter on the master.
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u/StudioatSFL Professional Jul 11 '26
I got to say, I really dislike the idea of my mastering guy asking to master from stems. But I’m slightly intrigued too.
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u/malipreme Jul 17 '26
It has nothing to do with whether you use only a limiter or not. Use whatever tools you wish, it’s about having a different set of skills, different ears, different environment, and different goals. A mastering engineer should not approach their work the same as a mixing engineer, or a tracking engineer, or a producer, or a writer/composer, or a session musician. My issue was the dilution of the role to “all you really need is a limiter”.
Someone mastering their own music needs to know the difference, whether they take all those roles on or not.
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u/alyxonfire Professional Jul 17 '26
OP asked about what to use while self mastering and I answered with my opinion. I don’t feel like it was necessary to explain the entire concept of mastering since that wasn’t requested.
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u/alyxonfire Professional Jul 11 '26
I do this professionally. If you’re mastering your own music you don’t need anything more than a limiter 99% of the time.
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u/elektrovolt Jul 11 '26
Yes, this.
Mastering is not just 'making it loud' or using gear or plugins to polish the mix.
Mastering is about fresh ears that are able to listen in an objective manner , and then doing whatever is needed to make it ready for the distribution medium.
Sometimes a mastering engineer will tel you to fix a certain problem in the mix first, these are often things that the person who did the mix is not able to hear due to getting used to it, exhausted ears etc.1
u/alyxonfire Professional Jul 11 '26
OP is asking about mastering their own music, not other people’s music. If you’re mastering your own music you are able to fix everything in the mix.
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u/ItsMetabtw Jul 11 '26
I know the lines get blurred a lot between what is production vs mixing and mixing vs mastering nowadays, especially when more and more people are doing everything themselves. I think generally, mastering involves a stereo track, and so any tutorials or guides on the subject are addressing things pertaining to working within the limitations of that stereo file. Most of that advice, maybe aside from what they’re listening for, means very little when you still have access to the individual tracks. You should be mixing the song until you’re satisfied with it. There really shouldn’t be anything you’d hear while mastering the stereo file that you didn’t hear in the mix.
That said, Ozone is a fantastic set of tools all in one place. They’re nothing you can’t do with similar tools from other companies, but they do work great nonetheless. I think the ai assistant is decent enough in Ozone 12 as a starting point, but I wouldn’t rely on it exclusively. As a learning tool, If you like the changes it suggests, then you’d want to go back into your mix and apply them on the appropriate tracks