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Anyone actually able to use Ozone12 on Windows - what are your specs?

Islabonita

Hi.

I recently upgraded from Ozone 9 - as a part of "everything bundle". Yes, I know, long overdue etc etc, but 9 worked fine for me and there wasn't anything too lucrative for my needs in the in-between versions. Anyway, to my very unpleasant surprise, I'm virtually unable to use Ozone 12, as it chokes my computer immediately upon loading whatever preset. Using Nuendo 15 as the host, but things are not much better with Nuendo 14 either. I wouldn't say I'm a computer-savvy person, but I do reckon my machine - though the build is about 5 years old - should easily meet all the requirements for such tasks even today and should be for quite a few more years. Please advise - what am I doing wrong, or are there any tweaks that can be done?

Situation in the uploaded image is following:

Ozone 12 being the only plugin in the session overall CPU usage @ 51% (35ish of which is used by nuendo/ozone. Spike in the cores' utilisation is the momed I switch on Ozone 12.

So computer-wise, there seems to be sufficient headroom, however Nuendo/Ozone choke completely, becoming awfully laggy and instead of anything workable putting out a few snippets of sount every now and then.

Help please 😭

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Islabonita

Apologies, I'm obviously new here 😊I thought my computer's specs would show under my post or my name - it did not.

Intel(R) Core(TM) i9-10940X CPU @ 3 .30GHz (3.31 GHz)

PoorFellow

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/50961/anyone-actually-able-to-use-ozone12-on-windows-what-are-your-specs

Sorry , I think that in general then this topic require someone with considerable more experience than I with Ozone. However I think that I remember Matthew_NI (who is a true iZotope expert) making some comments trough time about how iZotope RX and I think also Ozone to some extend (at least some modules) were only for processing while mixing / mastering.

Also then from personal experience with RX then while using a CPU four generations poorer than yours then my computer more or less froze when trying to use RX which was one reason more why I had to upgrade computer myself. Yes, the topic here is Ozone ,, not RX , but I comprehended my own RX problem as a problem because of the programs' heavy use of builtin AI. And in your case I personally think that it is the AI use in Ozone 12 that is creating the problem.

Personally then as apart of upgrading my computer then I ended up also upgrading my NVidia GPU to something with relatively good AI support… (I personally think that we should not have to upgrade our computers all the time but apparently then that is how it is…).

I don't know how much 'real time processing' you can expect a computer to do when it comes to Ozone 12 but my guess is that you would have to limit some modules use to mixing/mastering.

From what I read then you should expect high CPU usage especially if combining IRC 5, Stem EQ, and Unlimiter.

I found this support article for you : Reducing Ozone's latency and CPU usage

Vocalpoint

@PoorFellow nailed this.

I use Ozone here - all the time - but it is not designed to be used in a session. It is designed to be used in mastering scenarios.

Thinking you can simply start jamming the full Ozone (mothership) plugin into an insert on a track in Nuendo and have things run normally - is wishful thinking.

This thing eats CPU for breakfast and it's all about where your use it

Islabonita

@PoorFellow - Thank you so much for the link to the article, diving into it right away!

Islabonita

@Vocalpoint - I'm aware it's a mastering plugin. It's exactly what I'm trying to do, I thought the screenshot is rather self-explanatory.

Uwe303

If you master try to increase the buffer size as much as you can delay is not important for mastering purposes, cause you have all modules in series and on your picture I see a lot of them, the computer now tries to compute everything in time but FX in series always depend on all FX before so it's a chain of computing every FX one by one. On top I guess you use high resolution and sampling frequency, and that's fine but that also needs more power from the CPU.

Vocalpoint

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/263384#Comment_263384

Apologies. I could not see enough from the shot. Could not make it any bigger

That said - I used an i5-10600K for several years and never had any issues with Ozone 10 or whatever was current circa mid2022.

Overall - my experience with Ozone (and any IzoTope product TBH) is that you should find a version that works and stick with it until you or your workflow actually justifies a change.

I find that as long as my existing version (Ozone 11 ADV as of now) does what I need it to - I would never upgrade Ozone if I knew I was gonna kill my hardware in the process.

I know this doesn’t help your scene but the only way to make Ozone 12 go faster is to buy a CPU that is better equipped to push Ozone 12 around a bit more.

JesterMgee

Welcome to Ozone… Can often take far less overhead using several separate plugins instead of Ozone IMHO and less overall delay.

One thing I do not see a mention of is your audio interface. What kind of audio interface are you using and what is your sample rate / bitrate and buffer?

TBH I would have stuck with Ozone 9. I stopped at 8 and can only imagine with all the extra bloat and slapping "AI" in it now it couldn't have improved in performance.

Islabonita

@Uwe303 and @JesterMgee - yes, apologies. It might have something to do with me being a newcomer to this forum (that said, not a newcomer in the audio world, with 23 + years of experience in different areas under my belt), but for some reason I "don't have permission to use a signature", where I would usually put my system specs on such forums. So I'll post them here for time being:

Windows 11 Pro 25H2

Intel(R) Core(TM) i9-10940X CPU @ 3 .30GHz (3.31 GHz) (14 cores, 28 threads) / 64 GB RAM - latest drivers on everything

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 (6 GB), latest drivers

Steinberg UR824, latest drivers, latency always set to maximum - 2048 samples

Nuendo 15 whatever the latest (currently 15.0.30)

What do you guys see here?☝️As far as I reckon, none of the above should be the "bottleneck". The screenshot below was taken when my mastering session got choked completely on Ozone12, while my computer still had plenty of headroom….

@JesterMgee - I see your point with stopping at 8. I could have easily stopped at 9, too, however music mastering is one of the few things about audio post-production that isn't really my strong suit (yet) 😊 So the 12's AI-based helper tools looked rather appealing and were exactly the reason I upgraded. I never imagined though, that they would make otherwise great software CPU-hungry enough (especially with my system, which is by no means sub-par) to the extent of rendering it virtually impossible to use.

So yet again, anyone being able to successfully use Ozone 12 - please share how you do that?

Many thanks in advance

D

Vocalpoint

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/263420#Comment_263420

Well - I "see" some old rust spinning drives in here (HDD). I see a system layout that appears to be RAID (not optimal).

I see the actual OS itself is not running on the fastest drive you have (NVMe) and I see a CPU from 2020 - trying to battle a very CPU hungry app from 2026.

Q1: What exactly is "wrong" when you say you cannot actually "use" Ozone. Does your DAW freeze? Does the audio crackle. What exactly?

Q2: What else do you have going on in this specific session - while you inject Ozone into the mix? Any other plugins going?

And on the other side - if you remove Ozone completely from this session - does your machine basically snap back to normal?

Islabonita

@Vocalpoint - thanks!

I see the actual OS itself is not running on the fastest drive you have (NVMe)

I see a CPU from 2020 - trying to battle a very CPU hungry app from 2026.

Yes, however its specs should easily meet even today's software requirements. I know I'm not a very tech-savvy man, but my system does have a plenty of headroom still left while Ozone won't play along.

Well - I "see" some old rust spinning drives in here (HDD). I see a system layout that appears to be RAID (not optimal).

The HDD's are solely for storing projects that are not in active use. No real work going on on the HDD's

As for the system layout - this goes somewhat over my head. Good hint though, I'll ask someone smarter :)

Q1: What exactly is "wrong" when you say you cannot actually "use" Ozone. Does your DAW freeze? Does the audio crackle. What exactly?

Yes, both. Or, well - DAW becomes extremely laggy and if one would call a snippet of audio played every 30 to 40 seconds "crackle", then yes.

Q2: What else do you have going on in this specific session - while you inject Ozone into the mix? Any other plugins going?

Nothing really, it's a session intended for mastering, one audio track, one file, one plugin (Ozone 12) - per session. The "freeze and crackle" occurs from the moment I load any of the presets.

And on the other side - if you remove Ozone completely from this session - does your machine basically snap back to normal?

Yes.

Per usual, I'm able to run rather large and plugin-heavy mixing projects, I just never thought my system wouldn't be able to handle one single (though very sophiticated) plugin…

Vocalpoint

Thanks for the update…some observations on your comments:

"As for the system layout - this goes somewhat over my head. Good hint though, I'll ask someone smarter :)"

Or you can just ask me. :)

Your OS should be installed on that NVMe - without any question. More importantly - the current system layout of C:\ and D:\ in that RAID container (IF this is actually what is going on) - is - by design - slowing you down right off the hop.

If it were me - I would promote that E drive to be the system drive (C:\) and rebuild the whole system around a new install of Windows 11 on that NVMe. You will literally breath new life into this system just by doing this.

"Yes, however its specs should easily meet even today's software requirements. I know I'm not a very tech-savvy man, but my system does have a plenty of headroom still left while Ozone won't play along"

While it seems (on the surface) that your machine "should" be just fine - I have seen this movie over and over again - specifically with Ozone. It does not care what you have - you just need to make sure what you do have - is enough to put Ozone in it's place. And it seems it is not.

Pro Tip: We could also be running into "extra" lifting/contention here - simply by the way you system is built out right - which is far from optimal.

"And on the other side - if you remove Ozone completely from this session - does your machine basically snap back to normal?"

Yes.

This is key test. If the machine snaps back into form - as soon as Ozone is removed - unfortunately you may have your answer. This CPU simply does not have the raw power to plow through whatever combo of modules you are using within that Nuendo session.

Another tip is to NEVER use the Mothership version of Ozone - if possible. And by that I mean the big "container" you have showing in your screencap - where you can pile 7 or 8 effects into a chain.

Within other past instances of assisting others with this - I have seen success with users inserting specific individual plugin modules of Ozone - rather than subjecting the session (and CPU) to try and manage that heavy "mothership" version.

You could try this and see if things improve but my overall take right now is two fold:

Your machine is not setup for optimal success for DAW work (in general)
I think you may have met your match with Ozone 12 paired with a 5-6 year old CPU.

Uwe303

It is normal for audio fx in series to not use the full potential of your system as I said before, so that's what I would expect. I can make a test with cubase and insert that many FX in series and see what's happening on my system - even if my system is different, I use a AMD Ryzen 5900x. But anyway im curious cause I never use that much stuff in series for mastering and I now want to know what's happening. Maybe I find something out that can help you. Your computer in general should be able to handle audio (until you have tons of FX in series)

Islabonita

@Vocalpoint wow. Thank you ever so much. I see. Will try and give your tweaks a go! Thing is my computer is a Carillon - specifically built for audio through and through, so I did put my complete trust into it. Great to have a second opinion every now and then 😊

@Uwe303 - thank you, I think I'm good for now - Vocalpoint pointed out the obvious flaws in my system.

Topic closed, I guess.

Vocalpoint

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/263439#Comment_263439

Glad to help.

Do swing back around once you have had a chance to retune your system. Curious to see if these suggestions help with your issues.

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