I told you I'd get it changed to $99

I'm not just a pretty face

Bajan Blue



3) The Limiter seems much better than before - I never liked the limiter in 4 and used to have it turned off and would use something else like elephant or Barricade

What you've done, you've just cost me $99 that could've gone towards winter clothing for my kids. And where we live it easily gets below 0 degrees F. Hope you sleep well at night...
 

 
Sven

Downloaded the Ozone 5 demo, ran the install (32-bit VST version only), rescanned plugins with the Plugin Manager. Problem: Ozone 5 did not show up in SONAR. iZotope Ozone 5.dll (Windows identifies it as a 32-bit VST) is there in my VstPlugins folder, but not in SONAR's context menu. I then installed the DX version, and that one does show up. That's a puzzle for another day, though.

The UI is nicely improved: bigger, crisper, easier to read and less green. Bigger EQ window is especially nice. Definitely friendlier to older eyes like mine. Controls are similar to O4, making it feel comfortably familiar, but with some ergonomic enhancements.

There are now two separate EQs. The new one is labeled "post equalizer" but you can move it anywhere you like in the signal chain (even after the limiter, if that's what you really want). I suspect its main value is in tweaking the output of the harmonic exciter and/or reverb. For my initial test, I did not use either one.

The main point of interest for most is the maximizer. The UI is improved here, too. First thing I noticed was the Threshold slider is now scaled such that the top 10db takes up 75% of the scale and the bottom 10db takes up the bottom 25%. That's a small but appreciated improvement. 

The next thing I noticed was the familiar maximizer modes at first seemed to have disappeared. But no, just the labels have changed. "Brickwall" is now "Hard", "Intelligent" is now "IRC", "Intelligent II" is now "IRC II". And of course there is the new one, IRC III.

Note: the ability to unlink left and right is now in Ozone 5 Standard. This was originally going to be an Advanced exclusive, but iZotope agreed with complainers that $400 was a bit much to pay to unlink limiter channels, given that this is a standard feature of almost every competing limiter.

A potentially very cool addition is the scrolling gain reduction graph, similar to what FabFilter uses. However, this is where I hit my first non-intuitive snag. There appeared to be no way to scale the display, making it useless for this particular song, for which compression was light. The gain reduction graph was an unhelpful flat line! The answer was to use the mouse scroll wheel over the vertical gradations on the left.

But the most confusing thing, and it's making comparisons with Ozone 4 difficult, is that the subjective loudness of O4 versus O5 is very different with the same threshold settings. I had to turn the O5 input fader up 3db to match the output of O4. I'm pretty sure it's user error. I didn't have this difficulty comparing O4 to O3, though.

CPU Usage: this project ran at 63% CPU under Ozone 4. With Ozone 5 and the same settings, it runs about 58%. I can't be certain that both were set up exactly the same, but I take these numbers as a good sign.

Bottom line...after an hour's twiddling, has O5 become a must-have upgrade for me? Something I'll miss so badly when the 10-day trial expires that I'll be compelled to get the credit card out? Not yet. But the night is still young.

Playing with the new IRC III limiter algorithm, the first observation is that it's quite a bit more CPU-intensive than the others. In my test project, it pretty much kills my puny dual-core CPU, going from around 58% to 75%, and dropouts begin.

Sound-wise it seems to preserve transients a little better, making snare hits and bass drum beater hits slightly brighter and sharper. But the effect is subtle, certainly not night and day.

Thinking maybe I just wasn't pushing the limiter hard enough to experience the benefits of the new algorithm, I lowered the threshold until I was getting a severely squashed output, very top-40. Even at this (for me) extreme setting, I had difficulty distinguishing IRC III from IRC II without peeking.

Just a preliminary experiment, but at this point I'm not overwhelmed by the new limiter algorithm.

Stereo Imager: does what it says it does, with a prettier vectorscope.

I thought at first that they'd done away with the delay sliders across the bottom, but they're just hidden now until you click on a "Show Delay" button.

I'm giving O5 a very slight edge over O4 in this category. Nice, but not a deal-maker.

I've used Ozone's multiband compressor a fair amount, mostly on vocal busses and mainly because it was the best multiband I had. I use it less and less as time goes by, but there are still situations where it really comes in handy.

There are some UI improvements here. For example, where Ozone 4 has three separate sliders for the three thresholds (limiter, compressor and expander), in Ozone 5 they've cleverly combined them into a single large control.

But the best addition is the gate. Now you can have gated upward compression, something you couldn't do with previous versions. I've been wishing for this. How big a deal is this? Maybe not so big. After all, we're talking about a mastering plugin, and the master bus is usually no place for a gate. Nice effect for a drum or vocal bus, though.

Bottom line...after an hour's twiddling, has O5 become a must-have upgrade for me? Something I'll miss so badly when the 10-day trial expires that I'll be compelled to get the credit card out? Not yet. But the night is still young.

You crack me up, BIT :)


Thanks for a very detailed review!

I'll be monitoring this forum closely.  Just hoping people will post enough good stuff to make me purchase it, even though, I'm not doing much music making cause I'm studying for my MBA, lol.

I have a proposition for anyone who's interested. Send me your unmastered two-track pop, country, hard rock or metal song (or just a minute of it if you prefer) and I will do my best to master it with both Ozone 4 and Ozone 5. Maybe I'll throw in Ozone 3 for grins, too.

I'll send both versions back to you without telling you which is which. You decide if the difference is significant, and whether or not you want to post it publicly for everyone else to hear.

I'm interested in a range of styles, both instrumental and vocal. Anything but hip-hop and electronica - not because I don't like those genres, but because I simply don't feel qualified to master them.

I'll take any file format you want to send (16- 24- or 32-bit wave, FLAC, MP3 or WMA), just nothing lower-quality than 256 kb/s MP3. If interested, PM me and I'll direct you an FTP server you can upload them to. This needs to happen before my demo period runs out for Ozone 5, as I have yet to decide whether or not I'm going to buy it.

I am still on the fence. My problem is trying to determine if the new algorithm makes an appreciable difference.

After re-mastering an existing song with Ozone 5, it was obvious that the new version sounded different. But it takes very little to make a song sound different; any little tweak results in a discernible difference. Whether or not it sounds better is a tougher call. Expectation bias is a ****.

It also occurred to me that I might not be giving Ozone 5 a fair shake by duplicating the settings I'd used with Ozone 4, so I set about to try and actually improve on the previous master without regard to what I'd done previously. It wasn't hard to do. Within minutes I had a master that sounded better than it had previously.

But then I went back in with Ozone 4 and applied similar tweaks, and damned if it didn't sound better, too! I'm wondering now if it's even possible to do an objective comparison of the two versions.

I'm also thinking that if I can't clearly hear an improvement with Ozone 5, then why would I need to buy it? Right now it's not presenting a strong case. The cleaner UI is a plus. The exciter is definitely better. But when it comes to the plugin's primary reason for being, limiting, it's really not selling itself.

But it's only day 2 of the demo period.

Well, the UI is definitely better. But, I'm with Bit, I don't hear a limiter difference that jumps out at me...'still on the fence. And I also agree that the $399 upgrade price for Advanced is...TOO MUCH!

PM sent with feedback. But if you do go the speaker way later on, don't tell me if I'm right or wrong yet. And yes, your headphone mixes are a tad bright.  

bitflipper

Even at the new lowered price, I'm still going to pass or hold off on Ozone 5. There are too many other, bigger bangs out there for my closely rationed bucks.

FWIW for limiting I prefer the FabFilter Pro-L so will keep using O4 for the moment.

bitflipper


It's likely that I'll switch to Pro-L, too. I've tried the demo, and it's the only limiter I've used that I liked better than Ozone. I've held off buying it because a) it's pricey and b) I knew there was a pending Ozone update coming along. But now that O5 has been revealed to be just O4 with a pretty face and a CPU-munching "intelligent" algorithm that sounds pretty much like the old algorithms, I'm thinking it may be time to move on.

Thanks bitflipper!  I am now off the fence.  I too am staying with O4 (btw, I also have TRacks Deluxe as well).  I downloaded the O5 demo, played with it, and really liked the new kinder and gentler GUI colors.  If the Advanced 05 features of undocking were part of the O5 and at the O5 price I would upgrade, but I too have been looking at Fabfilter Pro-L and also some UAD-2 stuff.  So, I am saving my $99 this time.  


I am very thankful bitflipper for your time and your careful comments about the 05 modules/components and the comparisons to 04.  Your online "notes" along with the comments from others about O5 have given me the information to make an informed decision.  This process of critique and review by forum members is why I visit this forum--learning from others.  

"cecelius2"
I am very thankful bitflipper for your time and your careful comments about the 05 modules/components and the comparisons to 04. Your online "notes" along with the comments from others about O5 have given me the information to make an informed decision. This process of critique and review by forum members is why I visit this forum--learning from others.

Hear, hear!! 

Thanks Bit for your time and expertise, it's always very interesting and informative.