Ozone 11 is released! This is the first product I’ve seen through from start to release as Technical Lead, and I’m so proud of what we accomplished. As lead, I was involved in planning and technical strategy, and communicating team status to folks outside the team. I also was still an active developer; some highlights I worked on are the Transient / Sustain splitting, the targeted Ozone Master Assistant, and the Soft Clipper metering in Maximizer.
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.
This year, I had the opportunity to be a co-author with Kurt Werner and Ezra J. Teboul on a DAFX 2022 paper, Modeling and Extending the RCA Mark II Sound Effects Filter.
iZotope just released Neutron 4, a mixing suite with new upgraded assistant technology. I’m not on the team that built Neutron, but teams at iZotope often interact and work together and I was lucky enough to be involved in one specific new DSP feature for this release—the “Tame” button in Neutron’s Exciter module. Designed along with my friend and colleague Kurt Werner, the Tame button is an on/off switch that completely changes the way Neutron’s exciter impacts the dynamics of a performance.
I built a real time vocoder performance system on a team with Kenny Carlsen, Alex Miller, and Lena Sutter for my Major Design Experience senior project.
This summer, I worked as an intern at Goodhertz, Inc. I spent 14 weeks in Pasadena, CA building awesome plugins with amazing people, and it was incredible.
One project I was very involved in was building Wow Control, a pitch modulation plugin that takes tape wow and flutter to a whole new level. Wow Control started out as a single WOW fader in Vulf Compressor, one of Goodhertz’s most popular plugins. I was tasked with finding the code that made the subtle wow and flutter effect in Vulf Compressor, putting it into a brand new plugin, and expanding on it to create a stand-alone product.
Over the course of the summer, Wow Control went from a single fader to a fully-fledged plugin. I learned about working with a large codebase, developing dsp algorithms, and designing user interfaces. I also wrote the majority of Wow Control’s manual, which was a huge learning experience in itself. I learned a lot about the importance of good documentation and how to explain ideas clearly and concisely. Wow Control is the first industry product I’ve worked on that is available to the public, which has been especially cool. It’s very rewarding to see people buying and using this product that I worked so closely on.
The rest of the plugins I worked on haven’t been released yet. All I can say about those is that Goodhertz has some great stuff coming out soon. Overall it was a fantastic summer internship, and I can’t wait to go back.