Other features, controls and the general workflow of Ozone 5 were also completely changed. Again, iZotope claims to have consulted professional users about that, being consensual the reverb could go. However, they also removed some features. Making Ozone a standalone application and plug-in host is a step in the right direction, in our personal opinion. Actually, this capability, coupled with the new GUI and the inclusion of dynamic EQ, is what is really new and important in terms of features (there are more things, of course, but we leave it to a full review). In the process, they took the radical decision of making it a standalone application, capable of hosting plug-ins itself (in the way RX was already doing). To do so, they decided to strip down the interface, take off some features, and generally make an extreme makeover on the software. So, iZotope decided to “take a walk on the wild side” and start fresh with Ozone 6, trying to create a workflow that feels “friendlier” to new users. After the long research was done, iZotope felt that, although Ozone was an incredibly powerful tool, generally regarded and with a great reputation, it overwhelmed many users, and wasn’t being faithful to their vision. And this is where things diverged from what we would expect. All this because iZotope has a vision for what Ozone is intended to represent to audio mastering, and they felt that the current version of the product wasn’t fulfilling that vision.Īnd what vision is that? According to iZotope, it is “inspiring users to feel more empowered when mastering their audio”. They also hired a specialist in human cognition to further extend their analysis. First they analyzed the workflow of experienced Ozone users, then they looked at less experienced users and users that tried Ozone but went to some other solution, and ultimately they even turned to newcomers, who never used Ozone before. According to iZotope, the remaking of the GUI was something they took very serious.

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