30 Mins into Ozone 10

Just listening in the car now. The Ozone 10 master sounds better than what I was doing before. Both depressing and exciting at the same time. A little bright, but once I get a baseline down, this will be fantastic.

John, I'm looking forward to your comparison as well. Ozone 9 has its place here, for sure. Interested to see if it's worth the upgrade.

It does tightens up the bottom with some voodoo that I apparently can't do on my own.

Wow...going back to older mixes I've done and the AI immediately beats any mastering I've done.

standard versus advanced? haven't used either

Loyalty upgrade for Advanced is $149 here at the onset.

Seems like there's a place or two through the year they (have) cut that to $99. That suits me better. But that also might not materialize...

A good overview :

I wrestle with this on both a professional and philosophical level. It's ironic that Ray Kurzweil, who has certainly introduced some noteworthy music technology, himself wrote "The Singularity Is Near" - detailing the ways we have already begun the metamorphosis of man and machine into one being. 

On the one hand, it frustrates me to no end that with my own experience and gear, a piece of software can do a better job than I can - even with all the king's horses and all the king's men. When LANDR first dropped, I tried feeding a client's mix into it while we were still working (and discussing mastering) and, once they heard it, were giddy with how good it sounded. And that was what, seven years ago? Even if we just use Moore's Law as a benchmark, the technology's capability has increased eight-fold since.

But that's on the one hand.

On the other, I have always viewed recording / mixing as a bar brawl. Whatever you can get your hands on to give you an edge is invaluable. I never shied away from using my Aphex Dominator... or the TC Finalizer that replaced it... or the myriad software solutions since. Especially because I didn't always have the luxury of working in a fully-appointed pro room, anything that would 'wonderbra' my work, I was going to use. 

There's been a collective groan from those who take a puritanical position on AI or machine learning tools. When does it stop? At what point are we even needed - I'm sure in five years time every DAW will have some sort of 'automix' function that may, in some ways, be superior. 

But we can still remain the 'man' part of Kurzweil's singular 'man/machine'. Machines don't have ears. Or taste. Or historical perspective. Use whatever you've got to at least glean perspective and then decide for yourself whether to use, abuse, or refuse it. 

And, as the pendulum swings, this will usher in an anti-fi movement of noble savages who either explicitly or tacitly reject overly-perfected music. I mean, that exists now already, but very much on the fringes. Even the most folksy of music right now can sometimes be so squeaky clean or use t-pain robot vocals. 

Depending on your working definition of the term, the spirit of what I consider 'punk' (as an ethos) will reappear. And that doesn't necessarily mean in the form of "three chords and the truth" - it could be any genre or permutation of genre. Think about how the dirge of the "Seattle sound" wiped out not only the last vestiges of glam metal, but literally knocked The King of Pop out of the #1 spot on Billboard.

Or how producers The Bomb Squad decimated the squeaky clean drum machines and electro-vibe synths of what was then rap and created dense sample collages for Public Enemy and Ice Cube in the early 90's.

Or how genres like drum and bass upended the pervasive 4-on-the-floor trappings of techno/house with splintered breakbeats and bass grooves that could rattle out your fillings. 

That's all punk to me. More than just a counterweight, it completely changes the game and makes the prevailing way of doing things look outmoded and silly before you're done hearing the first song. 

It will happen again. We're well past the point of the artifice of impeccably edited, mixed, and mastered recordings that feel like no human being ever performed so much as a single note. 

On a final note here, I still think the person who decided to leave the tracking glitch in Cher's "Believe" should be tried for crimes against humanity. Here we are 20+ years later and we're still listening to that trick. 

You might as well be wearing a Wehrmacht helmet to Passover dinner talking about AI-assisted mastering on Gearspace.

The production is all over the place and always has been. Trends come and go. Auto tune is going to be like 80s drums, dating most things instantly and sounded awful when not used for insane effect like the real In the Air Tonight, Born in the USA, and Sisters of Mercy snares. The difference is these sounded cool while auto tune is used to hide crap.

The Seattle sound only did it when they had something that sounded like a commercial rock record. Metallica only blew up when they sounded like Bon Jovi’s New Jersey. Glam Metal came back in the 90s as pop country and Pantera.