Mastering conundrum

Good evening everyone, long time fan of Mike and his tutorials, first time poster.

I am an experienced presenter and editor (many years on the radio) but always looking to further my skillset. It’s the audio geek in me.

I recently happened upon a video where Mike discussed using Ozone’s Master Assistant for a final master. I have downloaded a trial and am impressed. It definitely adds a final bit of sparkle.

One question is bugging me however! Imagine I have a podcast which is a mix of dry speech, speech over a music bed, trails and idents. Would I use Master Assistant to master the whole mix in one hit? Or would I break it down and master sections individually eg. master the intro bed separately to a section of extended speech.

My guess is that the settings which the Master Assistant generates would be different for both types of audio, so I am trying to work out the best workflow for a whole episode.

Really appreciate any thoughts you all may have on this.

Thanks a lot!

HI, normally Ozone would be placed as the last plugin on your stereo buss so that all your production flows through it and is dealt with in one pass - this should give you your finished master/imaging. You can still ‘tweak’ the settings to taste after the ‘Master Assistant’ has done its stuff if you still are not happy with the end result.

Now because Ozone allows its included processes/effects to be available as separate plugins for use in your DAW project at any point, you can use any combination of them on any tracks you feel could use the processing, reduce your cpu hit because you are not instantiating the complete plugin, and still use the complete plugin on your stereo buss to master with… cool!

IanT.

Great to hear you’re enjoying audio geeking over iZotope Ozone.

You can absolutely master all tracks in one go and this is a time saving approach. You may not get the best results as every track will bu mushed together. This is fine if everything is at the correct level and you want to add a bit of sparkle but I certainly wouldn’t recommend it to fix issues.

The better way would be to get every track sounding as good as you can then hit iZotope Ozone on the master track using the Master Assistant to dial in your sound. The plugin is not really designed to sit on each track and you can get better results with singular native effects or putting a plugin like Nectar on each track instead.