I bought Ozone 5 awhile back and I already had T-racks deluxe. Yesterday I received a letter from Izotope offering an upgrade to Ozone 5 advanced for 499.00.This is supposed to be 100.00 off their regular upgrade price. It still seems a bit expensive to me. From what I can gather the advanced version includes more spectral and eq tools. Has anyone here upgraded and if so do you feel it was worth it?

I love meters and graphs and flashing displays as much as anybody, but even discounted to $500 it's still way too much. 

They're in a tough spot, marketing-wise: those potential users who have no problem spending hundreds for metering don't actually have any interest in nor any need for such things. It's amateur geeks like us who'd probably have a ball with these flashy toys, but we aren't likely to cough up 5 bills for them. OK, yorolpal might, but he's a target market of 1.

bitflipper


 OK, yorolpal might, but he's a target market of 1.

What piece of gear doesn't he own?

I downloaded the demo of Ozone 5 Advanced back when it first hit the market. The demo has long since expired so I haven't used it quite some time.

There were some key differences between Ozone 5 and Ozone 5 Advanced that I said to myself I couldn't live without. Not talking about the meters and graphs and all that, but there was something else. Can't remember now.

I got the letter as well - kind of surprised me, actually, to receive a snail mail letter from a software company instead of an email.  I guess they wanted to see if it would get some people's attention.  well, looks like it did!

but I'm not about to spend $500 on Advanced.  I'm only slightly tempted by the $99 upgrade to Ozone 5 standard.

Worth is such a funny thing. If you feel you would need or use the extras then yes it is worth it. If not then no.
I have the advanced version and have used some of the extras so it was worth it to me. If you can go through the list of extras and think you won't use them or don't know how. Then don't upgrade...unless you just have an extra $500 to throw away.

The general feeling is people seem to like advanced over the normal. The price tag cut my research down to that generalisation and I never really went much further.

The harder jump is 4 to 5. Even in their demos they don't know quite what to say other than it looks better.

The best feature of Advanced is that you can use each of Ozone's processors as separate plugins. This could have been a selling point for me, as I often use Ozone on individual tracks just for its exciter or just for its limiter or just for its multiband compressor. Had this been a feature of the standard edition, I'd have bought the upgrade.

But since separate DLLs was not an option in the standard edition, the only potential selling point there was the new auto-release algorithm. But when I demoed it, I could not discern much difference between it and the existing Intelligent II algorithm, and the CPU hit was huge. So I passed on the upgrade altogether. Ozone 4 still does what I want and does it really, really well.

bitflipper


The best feature of Advanced is that you can use each of Ozone's processors as separate plugins. This could have been a selling point for me, as I often use Ozone on individual tracks just for its exciter or just for its limiter or just for its multiband compressor. Had this been a feature of the standard edition, I'd have bought the upgrade.

But since separate DLLs was not an option in the standard edition, the only potential selling point there was the new auto-release algorithm. But when I demoed it, I could not discern much difference between it and the existing Intelligent II algorithm, and the CPU hit was huge. So I passed on the upgrade altogether. Ozone 4 still does what I want and does it really, really well.

Ozone 4 does what I want and does it really well also.  BUT - have you had any problems with "motorboating" with Ozone 4?  sometimes Ozone will "freak out" and cause motorboating in sonar.  I can close the project and re-open the project (don't have to close sonar) and it will resolve itself.  or if I delete ozone it will stop, but even if I delete it and put it back it in it won't resolve the issue.  it comes back with it usually.  so I have to close the project and reopen the project and it's fine.
 
IF O5 wouldn't do that in sonar I'd pay the $99 for the upgrade, but that's the only thing worth it to me.

No, I've not experienced that. What do you have Ozone's buffer size set to?