I use audio units. No fair.

As a relatively new convert to Ozone, I have to say that if I was on a desert island (with a DAW, of course) and I could only have one plugin to complete a mix, it would be Ozone 5 Advanced.

I totally cheated, of course because with Ozone, you get a bunch of individual "component" plugins. And I'm pretty sure I'm using them in a way iZotope didn't intend, as individual track plugins. But the thing is that they work... only the maximizer in IRC3 or with Transient Recovery really seems to add serious latency (and the EQ in linear phase mode, but that's totally expected).

But I found that on my mixes, they have become my go-to plugins.

The EQ is phenomenally useful. Like Fabfilter Pro-Q, it has a great graphic readout, allows you to hone in on a particular band to hear what you're fixing, does linear phase, and analog modes, has mid-side, stereo, and left/right. All of that is comparable. But it also can take snapshots and do matching. Here's a post on how I use the EQ to blend two mics on a vocal to get the best of both mics and make the vox pop out of a really dense mix:

http://www.gearslutz.com/board/7848081-post39.html

The stereo imaging is the best I've found and as someone who mixes and "masters" (ducks for cover) his own stuff, I find I never use it at the mastering phase, but use it to great effect to move things out of the center. For example, on my latest track I have this killer Trillian bass patch that I crank up the distortion on for the chorus. And I automate the stereo spread parameters on the Ozone stereo imaging plugin to get it out of the way of the vocals as the distorted sound picks up a lot of overtones and starts to collide with the voices. Listen to the first chorus and I think you'll agree that the vocals still stand strong against all of that noise.

http://lightsfadelow.com/track/hurricane

I also used the Ozone 5 reverb plugin, stereo imager, and mid-side EQ on the Orchestra buss that you hear toward the end of the song above.

I use the "exciter" (which is accurate but terrible marketing) as saturation in lots of places. On the track above I used the Invisible Lift preset on teh exciter on the master buss, to A/B with and without you can tell it really makes a difference. I also used it on the bass in Small:

http://lightsfadelow.com/track/small


And of course you can use the dynamics as a gate, a compressor, expander, and a limiter. But who doesn't have 5 compressors already so it's a little less exciting to use that in any other context than Ozone. But, in the desert island game, it's a freebie.

And I should point out that the multiband is really nice to have on these plugins. There are lots of saturation plugs, dynamics plugs, stereo imaging plugs, etc. but having the ability to just apply the effect to certain bands is pretty nice. In the example above, I force the deep bass dead center but really widen out the higher bands that conflict with the vocals.

So I pretty much think I could mix a whole song with just Ozone 5 and be perfectly happy... and I'm beginning to get close to that, just because once you get used to the interface, the multiband, etc. it's easiest to just keep going back to those plugins.

(EDIT: forgot to mention this, but I've said it elsewhere, I think Ozone 5's maximizer is now the best on the market now that they have IRC3 and transient recovery... and fixed a few little issues with the latest Ozone 5 update.)

A couple other really cool plugins are RP-Delay and RP-Distort. There's a lot of talk about Saturn these days, but Rob Papen released this really cool little toy called RP-Distort for free (to existing customers) and I have to say it's more fun than Saturn. The main "guitar" sound on Hurricane, the song I linked to above, was a clean Omnisphere guitar patch through a preset on RP-Distort. And that amazing ping-pongy sheen on the vocals in Small comes from RP-Delay. These are seriously cool plugins that don't get much airplay.

Since this is the effects forum, I won't go into detail, but I'm just in love with Omnisphere, Trillian, Geist, and now Iris.

Mokafix pedals

biased much, Brian?

I guess these are my top 5 effects:

EQuick
....
Cheers
Dennis