guest4254 wrote: ↑Wed Oct 12, 2022 8:30 pm
Thanks for the reply Cosmic. I do have Ozone 9, and have tried using, but usually with similar results. Sounds great in the studio monitors, but sounds like crap in the car.
In regards to one of the songs I was looking to Master, I gave it another shot using Ozone 9 and it's manual function. Of course, it mostly sounded good in the studio (and I actually got the pre-master to sound good in the car stereo) but that caused a lot of sibilance from the vocals. A de-esser complicated matters, so I went ahead and treated each "ess" at a time. Got that to sound good, and here's what I came up with...(and I somehow feel like we may be in the wrong discussion group, but what the heck)
The fixing in the mix on the sibilance is a key, and listening environment considerations also come into play in the car scenario, but, with respect to the suggestion of the Ozone 10 Master Assistant as a starting point versus unsatisfactory results with the Ozone 9 Master Assistant, I would say try the Ozone 10 version and you may be pleasantly surprised. I never got even in the ballpark results with the Ozone 9 Master Assistant and typically used mastering plugins other than Ozone for my mastering stage as a result. However, at least thus far, my experience with Ozone 10's Mastering Assistant has been very good, and I have actually ended up using Ozone 10 (usually tweaks after the Master Assistant's initial suggestions) in the recordings I've made since Ozone 10 came out. In fact, in one case, I even went back and remastered a track I'd done using another plugin but had not yet released after experimenting with Ozone 10 on an unmastered mix and finding I liked the result better.
There are a few things in Ozone 10 that, at least for my purposes, have made the Master Assistant more successful (for me):
First, it can use the Tonal Balance curves, and other aspects of the mixes they used as starting points, to tailor your mix to specific genres (and against commercially successful references in those genres. It can also guess the genre based on your mix, but it won't necessarily get it right. You can always tell it to use the right one.
Second, you can also use a reference mix of your own choosing. This was very helpful for me in one of the recordings I was producing that was targeting some specific references, one of which I ended up using in this context.
Third, there are various high-level sliders to adjust the various categories of settings it makes in matching your mix to a reference. This can make it quick and easy to make high-level adjustments without diving into the details of the individual modules or at least get you closer before you do dive into the modules. And, of course, you still can dive into the modules if needed (I especially ended up doing that on the EQ front, mostly to adjust high- and low-end settings).
Fourth, there are new modules in Ozone 10 that come into play in this, and they likely make a significant difference in how well Ozone 10 does versus Ozone 9 in approximating reference mixes (or the general genre-specific sets of mix characteristics).
In any event, the bottom line for me is Ozone 10 has been much more successful in this area than Ozone 9 was. I mostly only used the Ozone 9 Maximizer at the end of my chain while using other brand plugins (especially Waves AR TG Mastering) for my most of the processing. So far, though I've only had a few mixes to give me data on this, I've generally ended up using Ozone 10.
As for the listening environment considerations, one thing I've found to be a big help is the Waves Nx Series plugins (CLA Nx, Nx Ocean Way Nashville, and Nx Germano Studios New York), which claim to simulate professional control room environments in headphones. Whether they are successful at that or not, I really can't say. However, each of them provides multiple speaker choices from the environment of the source studio, and I find that trying all of these out on my mixes tends to minimize needs for changes after car listening tests compared to prior to having used these plugins.