Izotope sale

[BillW]

Izotope is offering very deep discounts on many products through Jan 8. I've heard some of the mastering / mixing tools mentioned here from time to time.

Does anyone consider any of their products particularly valuable?

[GovernmentMule]

I use their products in about every project I do. I use Ozone for the master track. I'm still using version 5. I believe they are on version 8 now. I never have upgraded (why fix what isn't broken, plus I believe they removed the reverb module from later versions). I also use Alloy 2. I do not know if they even still sell this plugin. It is a lot like Ozone, but made for individual tracks like a channel strip.
If you like to insert each effect on tracks or the master track and do a lot of tweaking and changing out effects these might not be for you. I like them because this is just a hobby for me and you can insert it on a track and find a preset that comes close to what you like and then go in to each individual module ( dynamics, limiter, reverb, maximizer, EQ )and then tweak it to your liking.
If I had more time for this hobby I might go for one of the other mixing and mastering bundles like IK Mulimedia TRacks, or FabFilter, but the effects in the Izotope products are good and they get some decents reviews around the web.

[comedians]

Hello Bill

I have used Izotope products for many years, found them in my first professional NLE some good tools for audio in video editing all those years ago and I continued to use them through the various versions of Mixcraft.

In 2016 I got the Music Bundle deal with Ozone 7 etc and I upgraded the bundle to 8 when it was announced last fall - and pleased, because as these days I spend a great deal of time digitizing my 54 years worth of Reel to Reel recordings, it gave me the serious tool I've always been missing RX6.
I use Ozone Advanced for stand alone mastering mostly and find the new tools in 8, Tonal Balance & especially Spectral Balance are pretty good.
Neutron 2 is great starting point on tracks to find masking, dynamics etc and Elements is a quick way to get differing timbre for vocals with it's vast array of built in plugins, superb plate reverb for one.

The offers right now I think are good value for the buck (or as we say in Yorkshire "the brass").
However remember you can do most of what Izotope do with what most likely have - but not as quickly.

My opinion of course.

[rrichard63]

... I also use Alloy 2. I do not know if they even still sell this plugin. It is a lot like Ozone, but made for individual tracks like a channel strip. ...

Alloy has been replaced by Neutron, now at version 2.

[Starship Krupa]

I only have experience with Ozone Elements 8, which I purchased for $29 and consider a worthy purchase.

Ozone is an integrated suite of mastering tools, and Elements gives you 3 of them. So you get the EQ, the Maximizer and the Imager. The Imager is available separately as a free download, so you are really paying $29 for the Maximizer and the EQ.

However, with the integration, you also get some really good presets, and they have a wizard called the Master Assistant that asks you a couple of questions about the target format for your music, listens to it for a while, then makes an educated guess about settings that you can then tweak.

The 8 band EQ has for each band analog, digital modes, and then vintage, analog, baxandall, and resonant filter types you can select, and then a surgical mode, and probably does more stuff I haven't figured out, and the Maximizer has an auto-learn, hard and soft, variable stereo independence, LUFS metering, etc.

All top-notch stuff. I may wind up using other plug-ins, but they look great and for $30 are worth a bit of playtime.

Money is tight right now, but I am thinking of dropping another $29 on the RX Elements, which is the equivalent lite package of their audio repair tools, like a declipper and so forth

[Mark Bliss]

Thought for Bill specifically, you might find some of these are pretty demanding as far as computer resources.

More thoughts on iZotopes titles when I have more time.

[Ian Craig]

I have spent a fortune on this stuff unfortunately, but it is very good. I bought RX6 elements then upgraded at great cost to the standard version, which I use everyday, more than Mixcraft now as it loads a lot of plugins and I just need Spectral control of audio. I bought the Neutron when someone I know ranted about it then I got an offer to upgrade to the standard version which I did, but I've never found it useful for what I do. I bought Ozone 7 Elements and it had very useful presets, so I thought I'd buy Ozone 8 elements. Turns out it has completely different presets, which is fair enough, but I didn't take to them, but I decided to upgrade to the Standard version when I got an offer on that. Then I got an upgrade path on the iZotope website that was a vast amount more reduced than the Plugin Boutique offer (because of my previous purchases) to upgrade to Ozone 8 Advanced, so I did that.
I have to say that the Spectral Imager is brilliant because it has both difference switches and levels between the original and processed signal, so turning it on and processing with the difference can produce amazing results in isolating sounds, so I have found it very useful.
But my heartiest recommendation is for something else entirely Frei:Raum by Sonible (Classified as an adaptive EQ) which I got for less than £80 (it's usually & unfortunately currently £240). It can turn entire mixes from unusable to brilliant in 2 minutes through very few controls after it's Smart EQ section scans the audio.
I'm skint now and I'm away off to cry

[BillW]

Thanks for your thoughts on their products. Mark's comment on CPU intensity has me thinking.

Two more days to decide. I'm tempted only because it seems they are used by people far more experienced than me. I thought of them perhaps as a shortcut to "doing it right" (with all the tools available as was mentioned.

But certainly a quality shortcut = efficiency, not "cheating".

A shortcut I've considered along the same lines is EZMix - but I've gotten more efficient without it and the price and various add on packs make it seem like it could be a huge investment - money that could be better spent (like putting it toward a heftier computer).

But since I know so little about mastering, I do wonder if that's significant. And for $29 for Ozone Elements, it seems worth it. (It's $29 for Neutron Elements and RX Elements as well).

[BillW]

So to close out the thought -
I popped for the Essentials Bundle (Ozone, RX, and Neutron) at $79.

I have some very old tapes from my band in HS - digitized to MP3 but really a lot of noise that I filtered out a long time ago. Still pretty bad. I realize you can't make chicken salad out of something else - but maybe RX will improve somewhat.

Anyway - now i'm on to seeing if the mastering part of this makes things noticeably better on my newer projects without a lot of effort.

Thanks to those who recommended I give it a shot.