View other reviews for this product:
mooseherman « Great Mastering Suite »
Published on 01/10/11 at 15:08This 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.
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.