I just installed the trial of the full version of Ozone 3, using the DirectX plugin. All I can say, is it's absolutely fantastic. Every few months I revisit looking at what kinds of mp3 "improvement" stuff is out there and the recent conversations about dynamic compression made me look around again. I had noticed this product before, but it looked way too over the top for the simple task I needed it for, but I must say... it's processing is fantastic. Since all of my playlists span so many genres/decades, the ability to get some good compression along with some drastically needed warmth in the mp3 sound I would greatly appreciate. This product does that right out of the box using the great presets. I've tried various other things like DFX, albeit not the Creative Crystallizer stuff, but none of them really did it for me. More than anything, they just seemed to boost treble and bass, in addition to amplifying annoying compression artifacts.
This thing really just adds some kind of, for lack of better words, "warm and fuzzies" to the music. It just really, really sounds great. For anyone wanting to try it (for fun), I would highly suggest hearing it. I'm currently using the "Exciter - 4 Band Warmth" preset.
The nice thing about this is I've tried it with the same preset over many different types of tracks and it seems to handle them all pretty well. It seems to really shine on older music (that might need a little more "punch" to make it blend well with newer recordings) as well as not overkilling it on new stuff that doesn't need as much dynamic compression.
Now, if I could only get the $30 version to do the same within MC (assuming it has the same processing power... I'm not sure if it does... I assume much less user configuration).
