Well, Clint...I'll know my the time I'm comatose tonight! Just downloaded melda, fab, Izotope... should be fun... I have some cool heavy songs like Arctic Emergency which I think sound great... think I'll test them on that...
 
Of course, I'm so stupid I dont even know how to do that.... as an insert in the Master buss I suppose... or render down to wave and reimport the wave?  I guess that's how Izo works... use it outside of X3?  
 
Boy am I showing my ignorance....
 
Love you all!  Volts looking at me like, "come on, let's play!"

That's what I like about Ozone and T-racks. They can work in standalone mode. For Fab Filter the master bus is where you want them. A few good meters help with the actual mastering of your final mixes. The T-racks meter is good. A VU meter like Hornets or Klanghem's VUMT is good. A lot of people here use a wav editor for the final stage so you can do crossfades and manually set the track markers, but I'm on a budget so I use Sonar. After everything is mixed, I load all songs into a mastering project. One song for each track and start getting them level. Once they are level you can put them in  the order you want, do crossfades or whatever, but you'll need a cd burning program that allows you to place the markers where you want them. If you don't have crossfades just get a program that allows you to set the gap between songs. A great free one is...CdburnerXP. https://cdburnerxp.se/en/home

Just got back from a thanksgiving doggy swim and...a hearty thanks for the "giving" on this day, Clint.... I hope by this time next year to helping others in my boat... now I just got to locate those ik plugs from a couple computers ago....

I have the iZotope Studio Bundle.  And quite a few FabFilter and quite a few Melda plug-ins.
 
All are great.  Choosing one path would be difficult.  One thing I can say about the iZotope Studio Bundle, and all the stuff included - it's very intuitive.  The tools have a consistent workflow across each of them.  And they come with a heck of a lot of really useful presets.  So for me it's fast to get in the neighborhood of what I'm trying to get, and then lightly tweak from there.  For speed of use, I think iZotope gets me there the fastest.  For cool capabilities and lots of bells and whistles, FabFilter and Melda have a wealth of capabilities that you may or may not end up using.

lawajava
I have the iZotope Studio Bundle.  And quite a few FabFilter and quite a few Melda plug-ins.
 
All are great.  Choosing one path would be difficult.  One thing I can say about the iZotope Studio Bundle, and all the stuff included - it's very intuitive.  The tools have a consistent workflow across each of them.  And they come with a heck of a lot of really useful presets.  So for me it's fast to get in the neighborhood of what I'm trying to get, and then lightly tweak from there.  For speed of use, I think iZotope gets me there the fastest.  For cool capabilities and lots of bells and whistles, FabFilter and Melda have a wealth of capabilities that you may or may not end up using.

Hey, Lawa.... Thanks for the insight... You know, all night I was playing around with the demos... and I found that I'm really liking the combo of Fab and Ozone6 as I can bring Fab's MB and ProQ2 into Ozone and tweak a wave file there.... really neat!
 
Unfortunately, no money so gotta choose one or the other today and my feeling is Fab's JRR deal is rarer and iZotope will have bundle deals at Xmas... what say you?
 
It IS amazing what these tools do in the end.... what I thought was pretty good is better... 
 
A couple thoughts.... Ozone's displays suck... don't display impacts on waveform... like Fab... but having the abiility to work fab inside makes it way better... best thing about ozone...

Historically Fabfilter did not discount. Things changed when Fabfilter started selling through 3rd parties. I suspect the discounting will continue. The current deal at jrr is one of the best so far. On the other hand, iZotope does have a long history of selling through 3rd parties and promo pricing. I bet both of them will have another wave of sales about this time next month.

scook
Historically Fabfilter did not discount. Things changed when Fabfilter started selling through 3rd parties. I suspect the discounting will continue. The current deal at jrr is one of the best so far. On the other hand, iZotope does have a long history of selling through 3rd parties and promo pricing. I bet both of them will have another wave of sales next month about this time.

Well... my dilemma is.... the choice! Funny how I ended up this way.... I do like working outside of X3 to tweak the final mp3/wave I send out or post to soundclick.... but really love the visuals MB&ProQ2 give...
 
With all the Ozone6 hate, maybe prices will drop further... everyone loves Fab....
 
got an extra 300?

The tools in Fabfilter are great for tracking too. Once you get proficient with them, Ozone is mostly redundant. On the cheap (read free) use something like Wavosaur if your prefer working in an editor with VST capability when finalizing your mix.
 
 

I think I will become mad with all the demos I'm testing concerning mastering plugins, and with all the current deals, I 'va to decide myself (no joking, I come to have nerve problems so much I test, compare, listen carefully...) I started with the demo of the Waves Linear Multiband comp, and came to the FabFilter Multicomp...It's true that Fab plugin are really very easy to use and it's very nice; IMO, the Fab has a more "synthetic" edge but in a pleasant way... But when I engage the Melda Mspectraldynamics, damn, the sound was very good as it thickens the sound while controlling it, but in a way that seemed to me more natural than the Fab (Sorry for my lack of technical words) . BY CONS, even if the Melda plugs have a big window GUI, I don't grasp their "logic " and for me, it's a pity that they have not so direct access functions like Fab... And concerning Mspectraldynamics, it induces a big latency. I don't know for the other Melda plugins ?
Concerning Eq, I heard excellent things from DMG audio : particularly equilibrium and the "little" Equick... But I didn't test and it seems that they not propose "dynamic" ability.
 
On a personal feeling, I 'm always in search of  how a commercial hit song/music has this famous impact sound, and it would seem that these "dynamic" tools could help (?)

 

Your feedback is invaluable, scook.... and cheaper than a loan!!! 
Yea, I love MB and Q2 for tracking... was mucking around with drums a lot last night and as I just do stereo mixes, this was great...
 
Wavosaur... wow.... 
 
Call me stupid, but how to you shorten a link like that?  I would love to have a "my music" link in my sig but always use  the long form...