Well, I know that using an “all-in-one” mastering plugin is considered unprofessional by some, and I know that some here are totally against multiband compression, but I must say I am not a part of any of these groups… (yet)
Is anyone using Dynasone by Prosoniq?
I guess that Izotope’s Ozone is probably the most common mastering plugin, but assuming that you do your equalization and widening before you reach the mastering stage, Dynasone looks like a simple and useful maximizer / exciter.
A guy i know really rated T-racks, which i used for a while.
Im going back about 4 or so years and maybe they are superceded now.
This guy and his band got signed to Sony (and later dumped but…)
He knows what he’s on about and i found it vey useful, back when i used VSTs.
I masterd an album/demo album me and a friend made and we did get a little interest from a world class producer and some small labels.
There’s a stand alone version that you load a wav into, or a vst plug in that you can drop across your main outputs.
It ran on a p2 333, so i’d say it must be efficiently coded. They are still selling it now…
I have no idea if its been further improved.
I may see if i can get it to run in Linux… and then eat my own hat or stuff socks in my big mouth.
It really does warm up a track and gell things together. I liked it.
It also could really cut out the ultra low end of your mix… which can really sap energy from your headroom. http://www.t-racks.com/
Hi there Icarus! you are very active in searching some mastering tools I see.
I am not greatly skilled as it comes to mastering but I can say this:
Maybe some things won’t be ‘pro’ for some people, but don’t listen to anyone to seriously. sure you can get great feedback from other people, but maybe this is it for you…and maybe not. It depends if it works for your ‘sound’.
like Renoise itself, is considdered ‘non pro’ by many people I know.
but I only like Cubase better when recording a band, and never going to use it for composing. just to bring up a comparishment.
Thanks jonnyz.
T-Racks was one of the first thing I have tried when I started paying attention to mastering, it was inferior to izotope’s Ozone in my opinion both in GUI terms and processing quality terms.
I then stopped using any “all-in-one” tools because I found myself using their presets and not understanding what I am doing. So, I am tackling one subject at a time. Compression, EQ, Excitation, Stereo Imaging etc.
Yeah, totally agree with you on that one.
I can tell you this - as you notice, I am not too shy on the asking questions part, so there is a time when I get many different answers, and I am going to try stuff right away - use this EQ, or that exciter.
This happened to me today - I ruined the song so much, that I decided to start everything from scratch. Not only the mastering part, but EVERYTHING…
So, I guess for me, so far, the best practice was to make sure that I like what I hear from the beginning.
Mastering, for me, should only be final touches. At least thats my conclusion for myself at this point.