Do you guys insert a mastering plugin on the Master buss or do you bounce to a stereo pair and insert the master plugin there?
 
I'm getting some pops when I insert Izotope Ozone on the Master and select certain presets.

amiller
Do you guys insert a mastering plugin on the Master buss or do you bounce to a stereo pair and insert the master plugin there?
 
I'm getting some pops when I insert Izotope Ozone on the Master and select certain presets.

If you're getting pops, you'd probably want to bounce it to a new track and mute everything else.

Could mean your CPU is spiking. Ozone is pretty heavy as plugins go. You could do as you say and work with a simple stereo WAV, or increase latency/buffer size to see if easing up on your CPU helps.

Hi. When I put something on my Master Bus while tracking, I make sure it is not something cpu heavy. When mixing, I raise the AI buffer, to compensate for look forward plugins that is cpu heavy.
All the best.

Ozone's a CPU guzzler. Bump up your buffers to their maximum and you should be OK.
 
 

bitflipper
Ozone's a CPU guzzler. Bump up your buffers to their maximum and you should be OK.

 
.....which is why I'm still blinking in disbelief at the performance meters in this new i7-6700 PC of mine. I use Ozone all the time. After 5 years, my old PC was getting a bit long in the tooth.
 
 

bitflipper
Ozone's a CPU guzzler. Bump up your buffers to their maximum and you should be OK.
 
 

So, where do I do that?  When I look at the asio driver settings in "Preferences" the buffer setting is greyed out.

ASIO buffers are set with software provided by the audio interface manufacturer.

Bounce to stereo wave file, open new project and import stereo track. Then do your mastering with Ozone inside this new project.
Like many have said here, Ozone is a CPU guzzler. You can spend time trying to get it to work without glitches inside your current project, which is subjective depending on how many tracks , plugins etc. that you have in the project , which all affects how smooth Ozone is going to run, but the easiest thing to do is just mix down your wave, open a new project and master it in the new project. 

If I am mastering my own mixes (or mixes I have made from raw tracks submitted by clients) I will do my mastering within the project on the "master bus" so that if required I can go back to the original mix and tweak anything "on the fly" rather than trying to "fix it" in the mastering

PCs are so powerful nowadays I think the lines between mixing and mastering can be blurred a little

Incidentally, I now have a great mastering chain saved as a Pro-Channel preset, which I can load in to any project or use on a stereo WAV

I basically have one instance of Ozone 6 set up with eq, exciter, dynamics, imager --> then I have the option to use the tape emulator (or other fx within the pro-channel using fx chains) --> then I have another instance of Ozone 6 with the post-eq and maximiser

This setup allows me to add fx "within" the Ozone 6 change without having to run it in standalone mode

The only thing I lack is the volume matching bypass feature of Ozone as I need to bypass everything, which I would like to do in one click but I can't add pro-channel buttons to groups