iZotope Ozone 3

This ozone 3 is a great mastering suit, it is outdated now by ozone 4 but it is still good and a little cheaper so if you can not afford the new ozone 4 then you could pick up this one very easily.
Its a quick download and installation and works with all digital audio workstations such as fl studio and pro tools.
Everything is pretty easy to understand but may take your time to fully grasp the plug in.
Its easy to use and the presets are very helpful if you are just starting out mastering your work for the first time.
The manual is pretty clear and I have learnt a lot from it.
Very nice and un-stressful to install.

SUITABILITY/PERFORMANCE

With my laptop having 4gb ram and a 1.8GHz processor it runs pretty smoothly but it still eats the cpu quite a lot.
I mean if you open it on a blank document and turn it on it will be using 40% of your cpu for just being on.
Best way to stop your computer from lagging with this plug in is to export a wav file of your finished project and then go onto the mastering stage in a new project. This is my preferred method of mastering my tracks now as it is less stressful to do.
I used this a lot until I finally got ozone 4 but I can not remember how long I have actually used it for... sorry.
Everything on the plug in is stable and it has never crashed on me.

OVERALL OPINION

I dislike the amount of cpu that it uses, apart from that it is great but since there is ozone 4 out now I would recommend you just go for that instead.
Quality of sound is great, presets are great.
Everything is great on this program.
I would still use ozone but not this one as I have ozone 4 and I like that a little more.

This is a mastering/limiting plug-in from iZotope, who are without a doubt one of the most talented plug-in software manufacturers working in audio production today. I haven't had any compatibility issues with this plug-in at all, it works great in Pro Tools and I've heard it is fantastic for other DAWs as well. The manual explained everything I needed to know, and actually gave a decent summary of what mastering was in general, I really thought it was a great resource for this plug-in. The setup of it isn't that simple, but neither is mastering, so the manual really helped there. The functions that are necessary (there are 7: Loudness Maximizer, Paragraphic EQ, Multiband Dynamics, Multiband Stereo Imaging, Harmonic Exciter, Dithering, Mastering Reverb) are all easy to access.

SUITABILITY/PERFORMANCE

I've never had a problem with this plug-in's performance. It's certainly a bit bigger and uses more processing power than a single-channel EQ would, for instance, but this is fine as you probably wouldn't master anything until the mix was done anyway. It's been perfectly stable for me, it has never crashed. It's been a solid performance, sometimes a little bit slow but that happens on our system anyways. I've only been using it a few months now, and only when trying to make demos listenable (we'd send our professional work to a mastering lab as policy, though I feel now that I could do a good job of it with Ozone). But I feel comfortable with it already.

OVERALL OPINION

This software makes my mixes sound great, really. Whenever I'm worried about the levels being too drastic, there being too much high or low end, the whole mix being too dry, or other such things, I'm always glad to have this at the end of the day. The interface of the system makes multiband EQ and compression much easier to gauge, as it's relying on a graph and more visual cues than knobs. Thus I can give it a more consistent EQ, a more consistent dynamic level, as well as use the harmonic exciter to bring the depth of the recording out more. There's just a lot of functions here, it's great to have assuming your system is qualified to use it. Basically this is a fanastic plug-in for mastering that is worth checking out.

Ozone installed without any problems for me. It is not a large program so it went very quickly. I didn't have any compatibility issues when installing it. The configuration and setup is very simple, you just load it into your VST plug-ins list and then you should be all set to use it. The manual is very detailed and has pictures to help out, so it's definitely sufficient.

SUITABILITY/PERFORMANCE

I am running a windows XP system with Nuendo. It is a Dell computer and has a dual core processor and 4GB of ram. Ozone works perfectly fine on this system. When you are running a whole song through ozone with each of the 6 mastering modules engaged (EQ, Loudness Max, Reverb, Exciter, Stereo Imager, and Multiband Compressor), you will be getting a very heavy hit on your CPU. This is a very processor intensive program so you will want to wait til the very end of your work before using this one. It is very stable, it has never caused any crashes that I can remember.

OVERALL OPINION

I have been using this for about 3 years. Immediately, even when I barely knew how to use it, it made my recordings sound worlds better. I'm not sure what kind of crazy geniuses they have at iZotope, but they know what they're doing. This is truly a must have piece of software for me - I use it on every single thing I do. My only real complaint about it is the heavy CPU toll, but it is definitely worth it. Also you should just export a Wav of your mix, and start a new project file with only that file running through Ozone, and the CPU won't be as much of a problem. This is by far my favorite software mastering suite on the market. The value is great, I'd pay twice as much for it. I would definitely get it again.

IZotope Ozone 3 couldn't have been easier to install, I had no issues setting it up and have continued to have no problems with it. I didn't look at the manual at all because it was easy enough for me to set up.

SUITABILITY/PERFORMANCE

I am running it with Pro Tools LE 7.4 and a Macbook Pro (2.2 Ghz, 2 GB Ram) along with a Digidesign 002R and iZotope Ozone works great with it. It runs so smooth and I feel I can use it on multiple tracks with no issues.

OVERALL OPINION

I've only had iZotope Ozone 3 for about 2 months now but in that time I feel I have been able to make my recordings sound significantly better using this plug-in. No longer do I worry that my mixes won't be loud enough as I just throw this on my master fader and I can use it's compression, EQ, and reverb along with its other features. I haven't used any other mastering programs, I was referred to this by someone and I haven't looked back. The best part about this plug-in is the price. Its really amazing that such a great sounding plug-in can be so cheap these days.