Ozone 5 and Ozone 5 Advanced are here (discount < 1 DEC)

mhschmieder · Post by **mhschmieder** » Thu Nov 10, 2011 4:54 pm

The official announcement is now available, in all detail:

http://www.izotope.com/products/audio/ozone/index.asp

Early GS speculation was that Ozone Advanced wouldn't be worth the extra money, but based on this feature set, I'm going to do the Ozone Advanced upgrade ($399) probably without even trying it first. I have complete faith in iZotope, and am very excited by these new features.

Note that the GUI has also been redesigned and is much easier on the eyes.

I'm probably going to do the upgrade as soon as I get home from work tonight, as I was going to wrap up a mastering session on a local band's 4-song EP anyway and would like to surprise them with an even better quality result than the "sneak preview" I gave them of one song last week.

I'm especially excited by the new Transient Recovery feature in the Maximizer.

I can't link directly to the comparison chart, but go to this page:

http://www.izotope.com/products/audio/o ... lights.asp

From there, you can click on a pop-up window that shows what is in Ozone vs. Ozone Advanced.

scooter · Post by **scooter** » Thu Nov 10, 2011 8:17 pm

Wow, this looks like a serious plug.
It would take me a while just to understand what it does.

scooter

nk_e · Post by **nk_e** » Fri Nov 11, 2011 3:13 am

I gotta say....just when you think a plugin pretty much has it all, they show you new stuff you didn't know you need!

This looks like a massive and well thought out upgrade. Advanced looks awesome and the fact that you can break out the individual sections as stand alone plugins is brilliant. The visualizer is really nice too.

Advanced is what, $999? Upgrade price of $399? An additional $100 off before Dec. 1 too? Yep. I think it's a done deal.

Good luck with your project. Always a tad risky to update stuff in the middle of a session...

EDIT: wrong about the additional $100 off it seems. Upgrade is $399. Still awesome IMHO.

Killahurts · Post by **Killahurts** » Fri Nov 11, 2011 6:22 am

Apparently the upgrade price for Ozone 5 (not Advanced) received a lot of complaints for being too high. They reduced it for Ozone 4 users to $99, smart move. I got it and installed it yesterday. Love the new, larger GUI.

I didn't feel that I really needed the Advanced features right now, but I might want to look at those in the future.. Hope there's a reasonable upgrade path.

buzzsmith · Post by **buzzsmith** » Fri Nov 11, 2011 8:51 am

Killahurts wrote:Apparently the upgrade price for Ozone 5 (not Advanced) received a lot of complaints for being too high. They reduced it for Ozone 4 users to $99, smart move. I got it and installed it yesterday. Love the new, larger GUI.

I didn't feel that I really needed the Advanced features right now, but I might want to look at those in the future.. Hope there's a reasonable upgrade path.

Good news. I'll probably go for it later.

Buzzy

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Phil O · Post by **Phil O** » Fri Nov 11, 2011 12:35 pm

I can't afford it right now, but the Pro version sounds like too good an offer to pass up. Maybe I'll scrimp and save until Dec 1.

Phil

mhschmieder · Post by **mhschmieder** » Fri Nov 11, 2011 12:43 pm

My client arrived as I was finishing the mastering on the four songs.

After some critique and wrap-up, we decided to have me to the upgrade while he went to the local convenience store to rehydrate with the sorts of drinks I never have in the facility (i.e. soft drinks -- I'm a water-only person).

The authorization of Ozone 5 Advanced completed the very instant he walked back in the door.

I then replicated my settings from Ozone 4, and we immediately noticed a difference. Things just seemed to have a little more clarity and be smoother.

At that point, I tried Intelligent Mode III, which is new to Ozone 5, and was blown away. So much more organic than anything that has come before. The difference is startling.

At first, I felt Intelligent Mode III was adding slightly too much air on top and maybe cutting a bit of the lows, but what is interesting is that this "went away" by the time I dithered to 16 bits, so I think they had that in mind. The final result was a clear winner, and we went with it over the earlier Ozone 4 masterings.

One thing that is really awesome about the new interface -- besides it being laid out better (especially the multi-band) and having more legible graphics and fonts -- is the new graphical plot above the loudness maximizer that shows you exactly what it's doing to the signal in real-time!

What I notice visually about Intelligent Mode II is what my ears tell me: it is more precise, with no side effects on neighbouring samples when a peak has to be trimmed. So it's like a surgical tool, with no smearing. The difference is quite audibly noticeable.

I experimented with the transient recovery mode -- which is new to Ozone 5 Advanced -- but didn't have any source material readily at hand that would benefit from it. I'll have to hunt down some older live recordings from a camcorder to give it a run.

Armageddon · Post by **Armageddon** » Fri Nov 11, 2011 11:24 pm

Not sure if I'm gonna do this upgrade. I actually have Ozone 4 at the end of my mastering chain for DC offset, and I use iZotope stuff extensively in Wave Editor, since it's the built-in dithering/sample rate conversion algorithms, but as a mastering tool, I was never too overly keen on Ozone 4's sound. While I could be whistling a different tune with 5, I wound up going with a combo of T-RackS 3's Linear Phase EQ, PSP's MasterComp, a touch of URS Saturation for seasoning and Waves's L3LL Multimaximizer for a limiter -- not sure if even Ozone 5 could beat that, though I'll maybe give the demo a spin ...

Shooshie · Post by **Shooshie** » Sat Nov 12, 2011 8:24 pm

Though I've tried Ozone several times, I've never liked the results as much as my familiar sets of plugins involving Waves, Nomad Factory, and others. Especially the Waves mastering bundle. The difference was noticeable to me, and after several attempts at learning Ozone, to make sure I wasn't doing something wrong, I finally decided that although it had an amazing feature set -- like a Swiss Army Knife, it seemed like a jack-of-all trades and master of none.

This once again piques my interest and makes me wonder if they've solved their shortcomings from before. If so, Ozone could be a home-run, out-of-the ballpark sort of a plugin. I'm very curious indeed!

Just for convenience, below is a list of features listed on the Sweetwater site as "new" to Ozone Advanced, though I'm not sure how many are actually new:

iZotope Ozone 5 Advanced Features:

• Enhanced version of Ozone tuned to the needs of pro mastering engineers
• Analog-modeled processing combined with linear phase precision
• Flexible sonic capabilities for adding realistic warmth, bite, punch, and space to your mix
• New IRC III Limiter for louder, fuller masters that preserve crisp transient detail
• Fully-revamped hybrid Reverb module
• Mid/side processing for tailoring the center and the edges of the stereo image separately
• Documentation that helps demystify the mastering process
• Comprehensive preset manager with over 250 professionally-designed presets
• New per-module presets and intelligent module Amount Controls
• User-definable signal routing and extensive automation support
• CPU-efficient and optimized for today's low-latency DAW environments
• Multiple modes of Intelligent Release Control technology for transparent limiting
• Intelligent III mode provides exceptional transient handling without pumping
• Predictive limiting of "inter-sample clipping" keeps true analog levels in check
• Adjustable threshold/margin, release and character controls
• Visual feedback via Gain Reduction Trace meters, loudness histogram, and Mini-Spectrum display
• Choose from analog-modeled EQ with "soft saturation" modeling or digital linear phase filtering
• Compare your mixes with a powerful spectrum analyzer
• Take spectrum snapshots of reference recordings with Matching EQ
• Mid/side mode provides independent, EQ curves for center and edges of the stereo image
• EQ left and right channels independently
• Make precise EQ tweaks by zooming in and out both in time and frequency
• Improved Plate and Room Reverb modes and a new Hall mode
• Control Reverb room size, pre-delay, width, frequency cutoff and more
• Adjust high and low Reverb decay times, solo the wet signal, and adjust the frequency response
• Mid/side processing lets you "dry out" the center of your mix while adding space to the edges
• Choose from three types of dither algorithms with six different noise-shaping amount controls
• New Dither Shape view helps provide quick recognition of desired settings
• Includes integrated DC offset filtering, auto-blanking and dither harmonic suppression
• Bit scopes and DC level meters provide a complete view of the digital bitstream and conversion process
• Retro, Tape, Warm or Tube Harmonic Exciter modes, all with unique saturation characteristics
• Circuit-modeled Tube saturation for subtle warmth and transparent dynamics control
• Saturation Spectrum display shows excitation by frequency
• Post filter lets you sculpt the Exciter's frequency output
• Natural-sounding Peak Saturation adds harmonics without drastic gain changes
• Unique multiband time offset controls for tightening and adding "attack" to bass and kick
• Analog modeled, linear phase, and hybrid crossover filters with adjustable bandwidth and Q
• Hard/Soft knee mode for imparting subtle and transparent compression to your mix
• Color-coded All Bands for adjusting relevant settings for every dynamics stage of every band
• Gain Reduction Trace view lets you find the perfect compressor settings
• Real-time visualization of dynamics within each band
• Visualize the stereo image with a powerful Phase/Channel meter display
• Stereo Width Spectrum view lets you see the width of your mix by frequency
• Use Antiphase Prevention to add width to any frequency band with no mono compatibility issues
• Multiband channel delay for adjusting the stereo field or correcting tape azimuth errors
• Includes options for mono, phase flip and channel reverse
• Module Preset Manager and module-specific presets let you quickly and easily mix and match presets
• Even more genre-specific mastering presets are included for a wider range of styles
• Ozone's presets serve as valuable teaching tools for learning to use Ozone's features

Price at Sweetwater for full version: $599 (off a retail price of $999)

Shooshie

David Polich · Post by **David Polich** » Mon Nov 14, 2011 10:10 am

I bought Ozone5 yesterday - "regular", not the advanced version. Upgrade
from Ozone4 was $99. I don't really need the features in the Advanced version,
those would be cool to have but not absolutely necessary.

There's a lot more options now than ever. To switch the EQ to analog or digital, you have to click on the EQ module, then click on the "EQ bands" button to reveal the switches. That was the only thing that had me stumped for a little while.

The exciter does indeed sound better, and the Intelligent III mode for the
Maximizer does sound better than Ozone4's Intelligent II mode. I have yet to
test whether I can get things as loud with Ozone5 (without knocking drums back in the mix) as I can with Slate FG-X.

csiaudio · Post by **csiaudio** » Mon Nov 14, 2011 8:00 pm

I am demo'ing Ozone 5 Standard and comparing it to my Ozone 4 that I have. First thing that I noticed when I exported a session, or anything for that matter, is 5 sounds much less 'harsh' that 4 - it sounds 'rounder', more natural. With my recent addition of Slates VCC and now soon to be Ozone 5 I feel empowered - I feel my mixes just took a nice healthy jump up in quality. Of course I truly wish that I had deep pockets for top notch hardware and a professionally designed mixing environment but that's not my world. However, with these new tools I am quite giddy with the outcome.

Here is a small sample of a live recording I took off an Avid Profile into Pro Tools at the church where I run sound. This has the VCC on every channel, UAD plugs throughout with the Studer plug and then sudo mastered with UAD's Manley and Ozone 5 at the end.

Hate mp3 but here it is...
http://www.creativesoundimages.com/mp3/Desert.mp3" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Here is the wav if you'd care to listen to that...
http://www.creativesoundimages.com/mp3/Desert.wav" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

mhschmieder · Post by **mhschmieder** » Tue Nov 15, 2011 2:52 pm

I haven't had a chance to verify the workflow yet as last night was completely shot due to my ongoing eBay nightmare, but Dave did comment about the need to click on the individual tabs so I think he might have gotten further than I did in figuring out the new workflow.

What I had to do was go into some other mode like signal flow (it's not in front of me; I forget what they call it) in order to expose the buttons for the individual modules. But this is because I often start with a simple preset as my starting point.

I did all of my own presets in Ozone 3. With Ozone 4 I went about 2/3 towards factory presets. With Ozone 5 I may well go 100% factory presets.

The thing is, with all of the current iZotope offerings, I am finding the macro sliders to save time in quickly getting to a basic starting point for a given genre or context or instrumentation. But as they carefully adjust related parameters in a musical way, at the same time, it can make the final setting (which is almost always custom by that point) take much less time to get to than if one was to start with a blank slate and tweak each parameter individually one at a time. I save that step for after first getting in the ballpark using my ears. I break it off where it starts to sound artificial, regardless of energy.

I imagine I'll start using the individual plus as well, just to speed up my work, as it's one extra step to carefully evaluate and analyze the built-in order of processors in a global Ozone-wide preset. I prefer a more direct signal flow that is visually obvious and trivial to control on a per-plug level.

toodamnhip · Post by **toodamnhip** » Fri Nov 18, 2011 12:11 am

I upgraded to 5 regular, thought 399 was a bit insulting for an"upgrade".
Havent noticed much difference in sound between Oz 4 and 5. It would be nice to be able to use pre sets from 4 in 5, but they must have re-coded everything as my Ox 4 pre sets don;t work in 5.
We'll see if it turns out worth the upgrade. For 99, there's really no big risk.

I do like that the bigger 399 upgrade allowed for the individual plugs to be used separately without using a whole ozone on a vocal for example.

But 399 is a bit insulting, it's like a new plug in.

Does anyone know if the latency compensation bug has been fixed?
In Ozone 4, if used on a master bus, anything recorded tended to print a bit early, and, some sub bounces could get out of sync with Oz 4 on in the master bus.

daniel.sneed · Post by **daniel.sneed** » Tue Nov 22, 2011 1:04 pm

My user Ozone 4 presets, once moved in the right folder, do appear and open in Ozone 5.
All seems fine here with this release.
In my workflow, as usual, iZotope rocks.

Tobor · Post by **Tobor** » Tue Nov 22, 2011 2:18 pm

Ozone 5 rocks, indeed.

I'm really liking this upgrade, transferred my old presets over no problem.

What is very cool is the fact that there are now presets for each module, and changing them up within a multi can produce some great results that you probably wouldn't discover with mild tweaking.

Two thumbs up!

Tobor

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