Observations on the behaviour of Ozone 9

Not wholly off topic, I hope, following discussion of Neutron / Ozone.

I tend not to use Scaler in a track in Live, but rather experimenting with generating Scaler lines inside Cantabile, then dragging them intro a live track and using other sounds sources. I have been working on a piece with 16 tracks, generating the sounds using Omnisphere / Trillian / EZdrummer/ / DUNE / BBC SO / Korg Waverstation and Arturia Piano 2, with Omnisphere (multi-timbral) doing most donkey work.

I noticed 2 things
(a) the LIve CPU meter registered when there was nothing playing.
live doing nothing b
I think this has been talked about on the Live forum, but my CPU didn’t show much. I took out all the channel plugins and Ozone 9 on the master track and the picture looked like this;
The Live CPU meter showed
live cpu a
but my machine showed
machone cpu
and memory
memory a
The Samsung EVO SSD showed < 1% activity from time to time.
Then I added Ozone 9, and it bumped up the Live CPU indicator to between 29% and 32%
live c
The machine CPU changed marginally
post ozone cpu
as did memory
memeory post ozone

However, adding Ozone appeared to increase the Live posted CPU by more than 40%… This was ,of course, without any channel effects.
I’ll maybe investigate this more to get a better handle on the maximum number of tracks I might handle.

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There are quite a few setting you can play with in Ozone 9, particularly the buffer settings. It’s a temperamental bit of software and is fiddly with its plugin delay compensation - the lookahead section of the maximisers and limiters require it otherwise you can get some nasty latency.

Thank you for this ; I had a few pops / clicks when starting the piece off, but they did not recur if I stopped it and started again. I put that down to Omnisphere using a patch for the first time. {I was using a patch from Nylon Sky, which are huge)

However, after your very useful pointer, I’ve now found the settings and started to examine them. I’ll start off with the buffers and look ahead times for the plugins it invokes for the piece.

Thanks !

My Scaler journey continues. It is simply an amazing learning tool, because of the ability to find alternative paths so quickly and immediately audition them. I’m now getting a good recognition of how many chords will sound from its name. Should be in every school that teaches music of any type!

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Hi @yorkeman

I have come across a similar issue with Ozone 8 in Ableton Live 11. As my DAW is based on a HP Pavilion laptop (16GB RAM and i7 10750H cpu), I assumed this was down to a lack of resources together with the historically bad design of MS operating systems (DPC Latency etc).

As I tend to use Ozone only for mastering I prefer to render my tracks down to audio, and then use the stand-alone version of Ozone to produce the master.This generally mitigates the popping for me.

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Good thinking, thanks … I hadn’t realised there was one, so I’ll go down that route in future !

Coming back to your comments about the cpu meter in Ableton, I am not sure how useful it is,as I have had pops and clicks with the meter showing less than 60% utilisation, and I have had the meter showing 80% utilisation, but no pops or clicks. There is an explanation of what it is indicating here together with some advice about optimising the cpu.

However, it does not mitigate the bad design of the MS OS (as an aside I believe that the acronym DOS as in MS DOS originally stood for Dirty Operating System althoigh this story may be apocryphal).

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Just to add my grain of salt…A few years ago, when i bought Ozone 8, i put it on master track and my DAW, Reaper, crashed very often. I also had HP Pavillion at the time, and it was a bit aged and only 8 GB RAM.
Then i tried using it as stand-alone and no problem at all. Last year, i bought a new Pavillion, 16 GB RAM this time, and had cracking and high CPU when i put Ozone on master track. And, again, no trouble as stand-alone. So, I continue using it like this.

quite oddly, I often claimed my PC was too weak, also the new one, and yet I’ve never had an issue with Izotope’s in my last hardware :astonished:

maybe that the audio card matters, but I have a cheap one
maybe that some driver conflicts matters as well

here is my basic specs

Speccy64-3