Your fav. mastering suite ?

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Make up your own mastering chain from free plugs, or maybe one or two paid.

You want a surgical EQ, a Compressor, a colouring EQ, a Clipper, and a Limiter.

That is just one version of events.

What does Ozone have then?

Reverb. Harmonic Exciter. Stereo Imager.

Well you can add those too if you want.

So many great Reverbs, where to start.

You get the drift?

If I was going to do this, this is what I would do:

1: Surgical EQ - Waves Q-10
2: Compressor - Waves C-1
3: Colouring EQ - http://varietyofsound.wordpress.com/201 ... sed-today/ but could also use http://www.stillwellaudio.com/plugins/1973-2/
4: Clipper - GVST GClip or ClipShifter
5: Limiter - VladG Limiter 6. Voxengo Elephant. ToneBoosters Barricade. TlS Pocket Limiter or one of his other ones.
6: Reverb: Valhalla, or Audio Damage for putting in a bit of space correction.
7: Harmonic Exciter? You tell me. Ozone 5 has a good 'un.
8: Stereo Imager? Flux Stereo Tool.

Now, I'm not a massive fan of Waves, but credit where it is due. You could easily replace those first two in the chain, though.

In no particular order. You want the Limiter to be last in your chain. And dithering after that if you must. See ToneBoosters for this too.

If you had to pay for a Limiter, I would buy either Elephant by Voxengo or Barricade by ToneBoosters. This is the most important part of your chain. If you really are talking about serious mastering, then you don't want any ISP.

But I got to say, as much as I don't like the company, Ozone is about the best all over. They generally seem to treat their customers well, and I was just a one off that they decided to shit on. I would still recommend them however. They make the best, most integrated software, and on the whole do seem to give good customer support. There are also some very good tutorials you can get for doing mid-side manipulation with Ozone. That can make the difference of a professional sounding piece or an amateur one. Ozone is brilliant for this.

You can do mid-side with the other plugs using extra plugs to do the routing, but it is all built in to Ozone.

Then again, it is good to learn the basics of each first, so when you get something like Ozone you can appreciate it and know how to use it.

The world is your oyster, Rodney!

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The MeldaProduction Mastering Bundle goes on sale in July.

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What DAW are you using?
Don't forget you may have most of,if not all you need right there :wink:

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codec_spurt wrote:You can do mid-side with the other plugs using extra plugs to do the routing, but it is all built in to Ozone.
M/S is built-in in Melda plugins FabFilter plugins and Voxengo plugins. And to a lot of free plugins like Baxter EQ, Density and Limit n:o6 that can be used for mastering.
But then again a one new thing to learn first before to use or... :x
codec_spurt wrote:Then again, it is good to learn the basics of each first, so when you get something like Ozone you can appreciate it and know how to use it.
That is true and there is that pit fall with program suite or more complex plugin. Either you don't know how to use all the options or those option drive you to a side route.

You need to fix a thing but when there is opportunity to tweak a little this and that you don't fix that first problem as well as you should and could if you focus on only that. That is also why I like individual plugins and I try really hard to use them only when needed :roll:

For example I need more control to low end so I put MMultiBandDynamic in. Now I need basic two band compression but the plugin can have six bands. It is tempting to use all those bands but then I use less time to that problematic low end when I set the other bands.
Same thing with limiter n:o6. If I need limiting and there is compressor and clipper and vintage meters you easily lost the first thing you had in mind with the limiter.
I don't have Ozone but I probably would tweak every knob even if I need something really simple :dog:

Like Armadillosound wrote those basic daw plugins goes a long way and are good for learning before spending money to something you don't yet know or understand.

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bbaggins wrote:As the very first reply from ATS says, you're going to get a lot of answers. By the time this thread has run its course it will likely have listed every mastering tool on the market.

There's a reason for that. 10 people can use 10 different tools and get equally good results. The reality is that they all do the same thing, perhaps with more or less intelligence, or maybe more ergonomically-friendly user interfaces. But the end result is the same - as long as you know what you're doing, of course. That just takes practice.

Having said that, I'd recommend Ozone as the place to start. For the individual who's still trying to get a handle on the whole mastering thing, nothing is easier to achieve good results with.

+1

You could build your own mastering chain, but with Ozone I personally like having all of the mastering tools in one plug-in. I feel like it helps save time, and helps keep you in the groove. I bought Ozone this year, and have NO buyers remorse.

In Ozone, there are several presets which you can tweak, as well as learn from. :)

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Sonalksis suite does it for me since a few years : Clear GUI/UIs, relative low cpu hit, neutral and efficient, bullet proof stability. I have sometimes used Ozone ( and mostly saw it used by other more knowledgeable people in diff. studios ) and it works very well also, though I feel more comfortable with the Sonalksis tools UIs ( I tend to overtweak Ozone, dunno why, while Sonalksis UIs put less appeal on my tweaking impulses .... )
http://www.lelotusbleu.fr Synth Presets

77 Exclusive Soundbanks for 23 synths, 8 Sound Designers, Hours of audio Demos. The Sound you miss might be there

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codec_spurt wrote: If you had to pay for a Limiter, I would buy either Elephant by Voxengo or Barricade by ToneBoosters. This is the most important part of your chain. If you really are talking about serious mastering, then you don't want any ISP.
I would be delighted to hear how you approach MP3 mastering.

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Huge vote here for Melda. Excellent quality - superb, actually. Now supporting VST3 and the GUIs are somewhat improved.
scook wrote:The MeldaProduction Mastering Bundle goes on sale in July.
Thanks & God Bless,
Bro. Charles
Reviewer's Revival Blogsite | Facebook

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camsr wrote:
codec_spurt wrote: If you had to pay for a Limiter, I would buy either Elephant by Voxengo or Barricade by ToneBoosters. This is the most important part of your chain. If you really are talking about serious mastering, then you don't want any ISP.
I would be delighted to hear how you approach MP3 mastering.
By that, I assume you mean, how do I prepare a file (master or not) for distribution as an .mp3?

Well, I take it down a dB or two as encoding to .mp3 will bring the peaks up and make it distort otherwise. It took me a while to figure this out and hours and hours of research, but I got there in the end. I forget what the exact figures are now, but for a file at a certain bit rate/bit depth? it adds a certain amount of overloads depending on how far you take it down.

Anyway, did I display my ignorance sufficiently? What was it I said about ISP that got your goat so much? I don't know what I'm talking about, I never claimed I did, and anyone that listens to me that doesn't do their own research is a fool. Anyway, I am genuinely curious to know what I got wrong.

My .mp3s sound pretty good, they don't overload, and they all get taken down to a 128Kbs anyway when I upload them to Soundcloud. Some say that just uploading them at that rate in the first place stops their shitty conversion, but I've gone past caring as I only have three people following me, and two of them left coz I didn't sub them back.

It's a harsh world, this digital life. Care to make me feel any warmer inside? Go on. What was it you were trying to say? Maybe both of us could learn something here.

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I am pretty sure the over-0-peaks of mp3 have nothing to do with ISPs. I can't really tell now how a ISP limiter would be any better.

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camsr wrote:I am pretty sure the over-0-peaks of mp3 have nothing to do with ISPs. I can't really tell now how a ISP limiter would be any better.

I also wouldn't think that over-0-peaks have anything to do with ISPs. Did I say they did? Did you get the impression that I thought they did? Just wondering. You asked me how I would go about 'mastering' an .mp3 track. You asked nothing of my viewpoint or knowledge in regard to ISP or over shoots.

As for your statement 'I can't really tell now how a ISP limiter would be any better.' I'm sorry, I just don't understand what you are trying to say or what point you are trying to make. If I made a mistake or something, then please by all means pull me up on it. I was being a bit vague, but you aren't really being any more lucid.

I make mistakes all the time. And like the great man says, everything I say should just be taken as extreme personal opinion, not authority. In no circumstance should anyone take what ever I say seriously. There are people far far brighter out there to listen to.

I still don't know what your exception is to what I explicitly said. Oh well. I am curious, but this is like getting blood out of a stone.

Edit:
I just found this article on ISP for any noobs out there - looks pretty good:
http://www.musictech.net/2012/09/10mm-n ... ple-peaks/

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So, conversion to mp3 changes peak levels and limiting has nothing to do with that. A "serious" mastering engineer could give the pre-mp3 audio some peak headroom to allow unclipped peaks post-conversion. ISPs aren't even the same with a mp3 if it does bandlimiting (it's what "got my goat") to 16000hz or something of that nature. And last I remember, people are still listening to mp3s. It's a serious business :hihi:
Last edited by camsr on Sat Jul 05, 2014 11:49 am, edited 1 time in total.

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whoops dbl post catastrophe

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