I really like Ozone 4.

The main feature in the upgrade from version 3 is the improved presets. Along the lines of what has already been said, I think of a preset as a place to start, and a way to get close to what you want, but never the final setting. Mastering is very much an art, with skills to be learned as your experience grows.

Commercial recordings benefit from a great deal of compression and limiting along with other mastering techniques, to make them sound louder and especially to grab your attention on the radio (which adds more juice of its own to the recording). You can use Ozone to squash the life out of your song by compressing it fully, but I hope you don't. Somewhere in the middle is where you want to be. You will likely not have the same arsenal of mastering tools as the pro mastering engineers use, but you can still make a very substantial improvement by using Ozone. For more money, T-Racks gives you more tools but also a great deal more complexity in using it.

Go to www.izotope.com and read the Mastering Guide prepared by the makers of Ozone, no matter what you decide to do. It takes a lot of the mystery out of this process.

BIAB 2025 Win Audiophile. Software: Studio One 7 Pro, Swam horns, Acoustica-7, Notion 6, Song Master Pro, Win 11 Home. Hardware: Intel i9, 32 Gb; Roland Integra-7, Presonus 192 & Faderport 8, Royer 121, Adam Sub8 & Neumann 120 monitors.