After years of using other mastering tools I watched few video tutorial clips from Izotope, tried almost all presets in Ozone. Why Ozone? Because it comes closest to that “million dollar sound” compared to all its competitors. My dear fellows, pay a decent amount of cash to hire a good mastering studio and repeat that on every album, or buy Ozone and become one of the “overproduced”. Overproduced is just a term that badly produced musicians use when they want to describe top hits. There was a time when you would need to stick out from the crowd to succeed, but now you should fit nicely in a row with other so called “overproduced” songs that you hear on the radio. Hmm … it looks like that I’ve just described Izotope Ozone in one sentence! Yes, I know, most high tech software mastering tools have similar ranks of effects, but it happens that one doesn’t have an exciter while some other doesn’t have a good stereo imager, and therefore the end result can be pretty good but still not similar to the hits which are mastered in big studios. Nowadays everything should be extra wide, crisp, with sparkling open high end frequencies and a tight well defined low end, and the whole thing shouldn’t be over-compressed but still loud as hell. The main problem with all these mastering issues is that we live in a 2013 and not in the old good times described by the fertile but slightly senile old gurus. The better the tool is, the better the end result will be. Mastering is an art and if you are a mastering guru, then you can produce a good master with almost any tool but most of the people that I know, producers, musicians and even some studio technicians, are not so good on in the field of mastering, at least without having a good “all in one” tool.

In times past I did my mastering with T-Racks, then with Maximus, and now I have switched to Ozone.

For the rest of us, a good tool is essential. If your a master at mastering, you can probably get good results with any tool.

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