 For over 20 years, when talking about plugins for mastering, this one has been near or at the very top of people's lists. Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you're well. The plugin is Ozone from Isotope and I'll be asking what makes this plugin so great. As well as looking at the current version of Ozone, we'll be taking a look at its humble beginnings and I'll be revealing why I think it still remains so popular. But I think in order to understand why Ozone is such a great mastering plugin, we first need to ask what is mastering? Mastering is the final step after mixing to prepare a track for release. Now many people I find these days focus on the loudness aspect of mastering. In other words, how loud that track is compared to other commercial songs being played alongside it. It would disservice to the skill of mastering to only focus on that one aspect. So as far back as the 1940s, when vinyl became popular, consideration had to be given to the release format. For example, recordings made on magnetic tape had a much wider dynamic range than vinyl so that had to be considered and in some cases for really bass heavy tracks, it could even cause the needle to pop out of the groove. Although mastering engineers have always had to be concerned with the release format from analog formats like vinyl and tape through to digital formats like CD, MP3 and streaming services and let's not forget platforms such as TV, film and radio broadcast as well. So for this functional aspect of mastering, engineers were reaching for equipment such as compressors, which of course can be used creatively as well to add character. Now modern mastering compressors are used as well as EQ, saturation, stereo imaging and things like limiters of course, which brings us to the topic of the loudness wars. So for some decades, mastering engineers had realized that music sounded better to people if it was perceived as louder. Now unlike volume, loudness is a perceived phenomena and we get it from using things like compression, limiting and even saturation. The problem comes from a smaller dynamic range. So dynamic range is the difference between the quietest and the loudest parts of the music. With compression and limiting, we're squashing that down and it can ultimately have the effect of making the track sound a little bit lifeless. Now this reached fever pitch in the 1990s, but thankfully since then things have calmed down a little bit because services or streaming services such as Spotify make requirements for loudness to make the playing field a lot more even and to make tracks sound a little bit more dynamic. Ozone was first released back in 2001 as a direct X plugin and already had six modules aimed at mastering. These included a parametric EQ, mastering reverb, multiband dynamics, a multiband harmonic enhancer, multiband stereo imaging and a loudness maximizer. By version 3 in 2004 it had become available for Pro Tools and as a VST plugin, making it usable by many if not most other doors and the six modules had been refined. By 2011, Ozone had moved to version 5, had made significant improvements to its user interface and had continued to improve on the sonic quality of its modules. 2014 saw a significant update to the UI edging much closer to what we see today. Ozone had certainly established itself at this point as a flagship product for Isotope and it was a go-to plugin for Pro and Bedroom producers alike. The UI had improved, the number of modules had increased and the quality or the sonic quality of those modules had improved as well. But for me, the great leap forward was in 2018, version 8, when they introduced the master assistant. This was simply some questions about the target format and intensity and Ozone would analyze your track and give you a great starting point with some appropriate modules and settings. It could even analyze a reference track to get you going. In my opinion this feature meant that Ozone was able to challenge the various online mastering services which had become popular at that time. The current version of Ozone, version 9, is an incredibly mature suite for mastering. The advanced version allows you to add 16 modules including four vintage ones, has improvements to the master assistant, intelligent track referencing, EQ matching, low end focus, the ability to rebalance core parts of the mix such as vocals or drums and includes the very handy tonal balance. Okay, we know it's big and we know it's popular but what makes it so great? It's true that you could create your own mastering suite using plugins from different sources but it's really nice with Ozone that you've got everything you need in one place. You can add or remove modules as you like and rearrange them etc. Now it's got the basics like compression, EQ and limiting and it's got some nice other things like stereo imaging of course and saturation. To be quite honest with you it's hard to think of anything they left out. So if you're not a mastering engineer and mastering still holds some kind of mystery for you then Ozone can be a big help. Apart from the automated features like the master assistant and the reference track matching it's always had this kind of semi-tutorial feel about it. Just loading up a preset gives you an indication of what kind of modules you might use and what order you would use them in. As someone who's always in a hurry to release audio to platforms such as this one YouTube the maximizer module is an absolute godsend. You simply set up the requirements for the platform that you're releasing to play your track and the maximizer figures out the best settings to achieve those requirements for that platform. It's simple, it's accurate and you can drink coffee while it's doing it. So although it only comes with Ozone 9 in advance I find the tonal balance control an absolute godsend. It analyzes key frequency ranges of the track that you're playing and it looks at them in terms of what are the normal bounds for that genre of music and you can see when you're going outside of those bounds. Now it is just indicative and I do sometimes disagree with it but I especially find when my ears are fatigued and I'm not really hearing well it does provide another set of ears for me. So perhaps before they've even got to this part of the video somebody down below in the comments will have suggested that you should never master your own mixes so here's my stance on that. If you're releasing a song commercially you're expecting it to reach a large audience and you've got the budget then I would suggest that you do use a mastering engineer. They have the advantage first of all as they're a fresh set of ears okay so they're fairly impartial as well to the project. Of course they've got skills, expertise and experience they often have specialized equipment and they will have things like specialized monitors and specialized rooms set up just for mastering. That is going to be your better option for a really high quality product and if you've got the budget. Now there are circumstances where people don't have the budget and maybe time affects things like whether they can really make use of a mastering engineer so someone like myself for example is releasing content very very rapidly maybe daily maybe weekly. Now it could be on something like this platform YouTube or it could be that you're releasing things like demos to SoundCloud or what have you. In this case you may not have the budget and it may not be practical to really send that material off to a mastering engineer and for them to master it before you can release it. So I do think there are good arguments for DIY mastering and besides it's great fun. By the way if you feel like taking the plunge and getting hold of a copy of Ozone 9 for your mastering check out the links in the description down below and also make sure you check the different versions available there to see what's included. Now a big part of mixing and mastering is the use of EQ and when I began to think about what some of the best EQ plugins around were this one in this video immediately sprung to mind. I'm of course talking about FabFilter Pro Q3. Check out this video to see what makes this plugin so great.