iZotope has just released the tenth full version of their industry- and home studio-standard software mastering suite, Ozone, and this week, Ronan Macdonald has been busy diving in to give us his initial impressions of the new modules and improvements…

In its goal of democratising the esoteric engineering processes traditionally involved in mastering, Ozone has always gone out of its way to make dynamics, EQ, stereo imaging and all the rest of it as approachable and intuitive as possible, without compromising flexibility or sonic performance – and v10 continues down that path.

In general terms, of course, this is still the same Ozone we know and love, offering a powerful roster of processing modules for the creation of custom mastering chains, with the reference-targeting Master Assistant automatically setting up a genre-derived starting point if required – we don’t expect any change to those fundamentals. What we are getting, though, are two new modules (Advanced edition only), additional features to two existing modules, and a complete overhaul of Master Assistant, all designed to maintain Ozone’s well-deserved reputation for delivering professional results through minimal user input.

The update also at last checks the Apple Silicon-native box (yay!) and – due to lack of interest, apparently – drops the standalone version, meaning you can only use Ozone 10 and its individual modules as plugins in your DAW or audio editor (boo!).

Let’s get into it…

Stabilizer Module (Ozone 10 Advanced)

With Oeksound’s Soothe 2 resonance-suppressing auto-EQ plugin proving so phenomenally successful, iZotope have, rather smartly, come up with their own take on the concept in Ozone 10’s new Stabilizer module. This is essentially an adaptive mastering EQ that constantly updates its own response curve in real-time to match the input signal to any of the ten genre-based Tonal Balance targets called on by the Mastering Assistant (see below) – ‘Country’, ‘EDM’, ‘Jazz’, ‘Pop’, etc – or the generic ‘All-Purpose’ option.

The Amount control sets the overall depth of the processing, but there are scaling controls for the Low, Mid and High frequency ranges, too, as well as Speed and Smoothing parameters for tweaking the adaptation rate and nodal ‘resolution’ of the correction curve, and a Tame Transients function for tailoring the response to drums. Unlike Soothe, Stabilizer boosts as well as cuts in its default Shape mode, but when you just want to tame harshness and resonance, there’s the self-explanatory Cut mode, which switches the Smoothing control for Sensitivity to affect the detection of resonances. Finally, the Delta button solos the difference between the input and output signals – handy.

Although we’ll need to spend a lot more time with those all-important genre targets to be able to make any decisive judgment, we’re immediately impressed by the quality of Stabilizer’s tonal smoothing, not to mention the slick visual feedback provided by the Difference Meter display.

Impact Module (Ozone 10 Advanced)

Described as the first of its kind, the Impact module is a multiband ‘microdynamics’ processor geared up for mastering. Microdynamics are the changes in volume of small events, like snare drum hits (so, er, transients?), and Impact enables expansion or compression of them to be independently applied to each of four frequency bands via a single bipolar ‘amount’ slider for each – up for expansion, down for compression. You can adjust the crossovers and global release time for the compression/expansion (in milliseconds or host-synced note values), switch in Auto-gain and solo the Delta, and the gain trace shows the gains for all four bands at once.

Despite its reductive control set – or perhaps because of it – Impact does a superb job of instantly livening up and tightening the incoming mix. We’re already fans of its empowering combination of effortless multiband expansion and compression, and that tempo-synced release option is awesome for rhythmic enhancement.

Magnify Soft Clip

Ozone’s Maximizer module has been crying out for a soft clipper since launch, and now it’s got one in the shape of Magnify Soft Clip, the name riffing on its ability to “bring your track forward” via the magic of analogue-style saturation. This 4x oversampling soft clipping algorithm features three modes for setting the level at which saturation starts – 3, 9 or 30dB below the limiting Threshold – and adjustment of dry/wet mix and Transient Emphasis. We won’t beat around the bush with this one: it sounds incredible, whether used to give a subtle increase in energy at low levels, or pushed harder into overt distortion – without doubt one of the best software saturation effects we’ve ever heard.

Recover Sides

New in the Imager module, the Recover Sides function serves as a useful adjunct to the mid/side balancing already in place, ‘recovering’ the sides when narrowing the signal with the multiband Stereo Width sliders, and adding them back to the centre, from -inf to +12dB, for a true mono representation of the entire mix. The existing Stereoize control is now only available when any Stereo Width band is widening (ie, above the centre point), while Recover Sides is only available when a band is narrowing (ie, below the centre point), and the controls helpfully light up to reflect this.

Giving mastering engineers another option for reining in overly wide basses, reverbs, etc, Recover Sides is a great idea well executed, and an easy win when it comes to specifying mono compatibility.

Master Assistant

The Master Assistant in Ozone 10 is both a simplification of and profound operational improvement on its predecessor. Its ten genre-based Tonal Balance targets have been modernised, averaging the spectral and dynamic profiles of the top ten hits in each genre from 2021, and adding the new ‘Cinematic’ option, similarly defined by the top ten movies of last year. And that’s only the tip of the iceberg, as Ozone 10 ditches the ‘What are you going for?’ questionnaire that had to be completed before processing could begin in version 9, to make automatic mastering chain conjuration a truly one-click process. Now you just play it eight seconds of music, no questions asked, after which a chain of EQ, Stabilizer, impact, Imager, Dynamic EQ and Maximizer modules is automatically set up, as guided by whichever Tonal Balance target the software judges most appropriate for the track at hand.

Before you get to the modules themselves, you’re presented with the new Assistant View, which houses the now-accessible menu of Tonal Balance targets (adjusting the parameters of all modules in the background when changed) and curve display, and Amount controls for pushing the EQ, Stabilizer, Imager, Impact and Maximizer modules towards matching those targets (via the Threshold parameter for the latter, which also offers ‘Streaming’ and ‘DJ Player’ Threshold range and Ceiling options).

With the previous Master Assistant only loading and configuring the EQ and dynamics modules, the addition of the Stabilizer, Impact and Imager to the chain is clearly transformative, and our initial explorations suggest that the starting points established are far more convincing than they ever were in Ozone 9. Whether or not any sort of game-changing auto-mastering potential has been realised here remains to be seen, however.

Wrap-Up

While we’re mildly saddened at the loss of the standalone application, and slightly distracted by the ‘circular slider’ styling of the new parameter controls, which feels a bit incongruous in the Maximizer and Imager modules, we’re certainly excited by what we’ve seen and heard of Ozone 10’s new features and capabilities so far, which add up to an unarguably significant upgrade in terms of workflow and results.