We tried to keep a little of the analog flavor in the sound, in our previous versions of Ozone. And in Ozone 3, the analog modeling was firmly established, but people have been saying that in some cases, they want something cleaner; they don't want any flavor, they want to be more surgical with the tool. So we added a digital component to the equalizer and the multi-band crossover.Getting A Home Recording To The Mastering Stage

Let's take a moment to discuss how the mixing and mastering process has changed over the past 20 years for the average home recordist.

Back in the 1980s, when I recorded demos for my group on a four track, mixing was relatively easy...because there were only four tracks (that's actually a bit of a simplification-in order to make those four tracks sound like there was more there than there actually was, I used a fair amount of outboard gear for reverb and effects). But I did all the mixes in real time and hoped for the best. They were pretty good demos, but nobody would confuse them for properly mixed and mastered track on a CD.

When I resumed recording demos in mid-2001, it took me about a year before I learned the software (Cakewalk's Sonar) well enough to complete a song all the way through to mixdown.

Mixes on a computer are preprogrammed ahead of time. All of the fader moves that used to be done in real time as the mastering tape was rolling are programmed in ahead of time. The result, ideally, is a perfect mix.

But there's less room for error. Analog distortion can be warm, wonderful stuff. But digital distortion is harsh and nasty.

I learned quite a bit, but never felt that I had something that was truly professional sounding. My first mixes were completed in the middle of 2002. I would spend hours and hours trying to get a professional mix that didn't push the meters too far into the red.

At the end, all of this work pays off, when ideally, the completed track belays its homebrewed origins. But for me at least, getting there was a fairly steep learning curve.

Enter Ozone

Then I read about Ozone in an online music forum late last year, tried it, and was pretty amazed at the results--and I don't amaze all that easily.

Probably the best introduction to mastering, even without Ozone, is the manual that iZotope wrote to accompany Ozone, which can be downloaded as a PDF file for free. It's designed to be readable to even those who don't choose to purchase Ozone. In fact, it may be the most readable manual to accompany music software that I've ever seen. If you're a computer tech writer or software developer reading this post, you could do far worse than to copy the style of the Ozone manual for your product-it's that good.