Ozone 10 is finally out! My team put together a lot of exciting new features in this update—Impact, a new module focused on micro-dynamics; Stabilizer, a new “magic eq” module; and a soft clipper added to Maximizer that sounds incredible (shoutout to Kurt Werner!) to name a few. I was involved with aspects of all these, but my primary focus for this release was completely overhauling and upgrading the Master Assistant. This was the most challenging and rewarding project I’ve worked on so far.
Ozone has had a Master Assistant feature for a few years now – it was first introduced in Ozone 8 back in 2017. From the beginning, its goal has been to listen to the mix and automatically choose settings that are a good starting point for a master. The most common critical feedback for the original Assistant was that it wasn’t very customizable—it had a baked in sense of what a “good” master should sound like, and if users were going for something else it was difficult to customize.
We completely changed the paradigm for the Master Assistant in Ozone 10 to address this feedback, so that now users can select a target they want to sound like and Master Assistant designs a chain to make their track as similar to that target as possible. Introducing this “Targeted” paradigm gives users much more control over the Assistant’s results, making it much more versatile for a broader range of musical genres and styles.
We include as factory presets a number of Genre targets which we generated by analyzing top 40 charts for each genre, but the most powerful results come from Custom targets where users can give a specific song they want to sound like and Ozone analyzes it directly.
We also added a brand new Assistant view, which has broad strokes controls and metering to let the user dial in the results even more before they jump back to the detailed view to fine tune anything they still want to change.
As the lead on this feature, I got to be involved in a lot of design decisions as we completely overhauled the structure of the code so that it could accomplish this new matching paradigm. It was so satisfying seeing my team rework and rearrange legacy code, bringing it up to our current best practices and making it much more maintainable than it was previously.
The matching paradigm is so powerful, I love how customizable it is. I’m looking forward to seeing where we take it next.