Anyone noticed Ozone 9's assistant is a lot quieter than Ozone 8 using the same settings? It also doesn't seem to be as full or as rich on the low-end as 8 is, I'm not sure why the algo seems to have changed so much when Neutron 2 vs 3 seems the same if not better.

 

I'm not the best person to make a comparison but whenever I used ozone I noticed that the assistant would raise your LUFS to about -13 but the sound will barely change. It's sketchy as hell in my opinion. I know you can use the maximizer to increase loudness, but usually to get a mixed track to -13LUFS there is a huge change in sound. And now they let you mix the vocals, drums and bass in the master which is complete non sense since that's part of the mix.

If I was you I'd take your time and use a couple of compressors and a limiter to achieve the streaming LUFS standard while metering with your meter of choice instead of using ozone. In my opinion it cuts too many corners and while the only thing that makes it cool is the assistant, it doesn't seem to work as anyone wants it to work from what I've read.


Please if anyone knows the plugin more thoroughly I'd love to know if I'm doing anything wrong.

 

Turn down your maximizer threshold.

 

Thanks for the suggestions, yeah bringing it down about 2dbs seems to match Ozone's predictions, but interestingly, if I slightly cut some top-end off acoustic guitars or hihats, the threshold is a lot lower, as if Ozone 9 is much more sensitive to supersonic trebles than it used to be?

 

It's not a non sense at all. Consider that the person doing the mastering doesn't have access to the mix to make any such changes.

 

It is non sense because even though you should mix on the mixing stage, not mastering, ozone lets you change the balance of your mix from a single audio file and it never gets the frequency separation quite right and even if it did, instruments have frequencies that coincide so you end up amplifying frequencies from other instruments basically ruining the work you did on the mix and unbalancing instruments that occupy the same spectrum.

 

It's obviously not witchcraft how it works and with dense mixes the results are obviously going to be hit & miss...

Bt as I said; if the mastering engineer doesn't have access to the mix or the time/option to suggest changes by the original mix engineer then it's a function to try...

 

If anyone else has both ozone 8 and 9, it would be interesting to know how your results are, I do like 9’s autoassist result, but it’s noticeably quieter (and maybe less tight and glued) than 8.