iZotope Ozone 6

Being and artists, husband, and a father of three, money can be tight at times. But I desire to make great music from the lyrics, to the production and mixing, and mastering. If you ask any music industry professional, most of them will probably tell you to get your music professionally mastered by a mastering engineer. This can become quite expensive for someone who does not know how to do any of this. But if you’re a go-getter like myself, you desire to be a jack of all trades and aren’t afraid of taking the time to correctly learn each process. Izotope’s Ozone 6 brings the every essential phase of the mastering process to one plug-in.

UTILIZATION
Ozone 6 is a mastering suite. I use it to give my music and clients, that final polish before publishing to digital stores. You can do all of your essential processing for the mastering phase of your music production right here within Ozone. Like all of Izotope’s products, Ozone is fully compatible with any DAW you have. On top of that, Ozone can also be used as a stand-alone application.

GETTING STARTED
Ozone features a sleek dark design that is geared towards helping you focus on what’s important. Each of the frequency bands are color-coded across the different modules so you will have a visual aid as to which band you are manipulating. Ozone has great modules for you to utilize. Within the software, there is an EQ, multiband compressor, post EQ, imager, exciter, and a limiter. The EQs, like Alloy 2, feature the frequency solo mode for finding problem frequencies. The EQ also features a digital mode and analog mode.

Looking at the multiband compressor, there is a “Learn”. What this does is adjust the four bands according to the best frequencies for each individual song. Mid/Side is also available within the compressor (as well as the EQ module). This gives you a bit more control by allowing you to process just the sides or center a song versus just processing the stereo image. Mid/side processing is also available with the compressor and the exciter. On top of that, there are tons of mastering presets for global settings and within each individual module to help to get started.

I do wish Ozone 6 would have kept the reverb module that was present in Ozone 5. Reverb is not a common effect you would apply during phase, but it can be used to fix problems that may occur with no other options available. If you prefer not to work within your DAW, you can use Ozone as a stand-alone plug-in. Should you choose to do so, you will find that as a host application, Ozone allows you to use other 3rd party plug-ins within Ozone. This will definitely be useful for those that have that extra special effect they would like to apply. Also you are only able to use six total plug-ins and modules within Ozone. I would like to see that increase to maybe eight in the future.

At the price of $199, Ozone 6 is very competitive among all-in-one mastering plug-ins. There are many mastering tools out there, and Ozone 6 is one of them.

PROS
Sleek design
Mastering suite
Affordable

CONS
No Reverb Module