Bang for the buck - you might check out Voxengo.com (try the Soniformer) - I have have 5-6 of their plugs - very useful for a variety of genres of music.

Rob

I know that you didn't ask for the following answer - but I have to emphasize that "mastering" is mostly about a set of different (and experienced) ears, not so much about gear and plugins. In an ideal world, you would ask a trusted colleague or - even better - a mastering engineer to give your work the final touches.

That said, there are quite a few plugins that can do the job, depending on the scale you measure them. iZotpe's "Ozone", for example. Voxengo's stuff, like Rob pointed out already. Waves, of course. Or the mastering plugins from Elemental Audio - namely "Neodynium". Sometimes it helps to add just a little bit of saturation and soft compression with PSP's VintageWarmer.

In the end, the treatment your mix asks for can be very diverse ...

Thank you for the responses Dietz and Robert. I ran across a company called Wave Arts who are going to release their version 5 set soon. They already have two out of the 5 in the set. Have you heard of them? Are they good? I like the look of the interface....seems fairly simple and effective. I've heard of Voxengo before. I've seen mixed responses on some forums comparing them with like the "L3" plugin of waves...is there something that is equal or better to you guys than the L3?

I love the fact that the Eq's of Voxengo have SpectruMatch so that you can match other recordings and have consistency [:)]. The only thing is that the interface seems very non friendly. The "elephant" from reviews mentions that you can get up to 3 db without the wave getting effected...L3 can go higher than that and the Wave arts "Final Plug5" can go to 5 db which is nice...I love the idea of SpectruMatch though.

Izotope Ozone looks like a nice package...There are too many "packages" though..from all these companies.......Is Ozone in any one's opinion a good one to have?

As I wrote above - it really depends on what you are after and how experienced you are, and how good your monitoring system is (on the top of it).

Feature-wise, iZotope is an impressive plugin, with some clever options - that can most easily tempt you to overdo it. - I would stay away from its built-in "mastering-reverb", though ... [;)]

HTH,

I'm regularly using a combo of PSP's Vintage Warmer and Elemental Audio's Finis; the Warmer adds a very natural 'presence' and Finis has to be one of the most transparent limiters around.

Additionally, I'd recommend checking out EA's XL Inspector package. Won't do anything to your sound, but from a mastering point of view, it's a must; a bunch of diagnostic tools and displays that are incredibly user-friendly. EQ analysis, Stereo image mapping, phase and correlation checking, more varieties of Level meters than Heinz has beans.... it's the 'cherry on top' of mastering plug ins.

Wave Arts package has been heavily recommended to me by guys I trust, so possibly worth a look?

Welcome Reid!

I agree: Proper metering is always good advice. Personally, I use RME's DigiCheck-suite for their HDSP-hardware day in, day out. Helps a lot to keep things in perspective, especially for the very deep low-end, and stereo-width.

I don'tknow how anyone could think about doing their own mastering, I tried, even just doing the most simple mastering so I can print demos to CD for listening in different environments and showing friends, I go nuts if I don't just add a touch of eq and I do mean a touch and L1 limiter I never bought anything else because I think I would go INSANE - multipressers?? PLEASE! no way. It's too hard. Getting the mix right is ENOUGH.

Miklos.

Actually, I agree with you. Mastering is...well takes a "master" to do [:P]. I just need to have a nice limiter/maximizer and EQ to do minor tweaking for people to listen. Perhaps with continual persistance, I will improve.