How to Use Music Rebalance in RX 7 Sep 13, 2018. Isolate mix elements from a single track with the new source separation module in RX 7, Music Rebalance. Easily reduce vocals in background music for clearer dialogue, learn how to remove vocals from a song, or separate vocal stems from a track for easy remixing. It seems that along with Christmas, another regular annual event we can rely upon is a new version of iZotope’s RX Audio Editor software. Incorporating an ever-expanding collection of sophisticated tools for repairing, restoring and enhancing audio files, RX has now reached version 5, with both standard and Advanced editions available. Jul 11, 2017 The RX family of audio editing, restoration and repair tools moves into its sixth iteration. The core audio editor has undergone no major changes, bar a slight facelift; with its adjustable waveform/spectrogram overlay display and Photoshop-esque selection tools there’s nothing to improve. Identifying problems in your audio and selecting the offending components is easy, though complex. The latest version of iZotope's RX restoration suite does more than before — and does it faster! One of the benefits of the massive processing power now available in modern computers is the ability to manipulate data in ever-more impressive ways, and with ever-greater simplicity and speed. View pricing options for RX 7. View pricing options for RX 7. Products; Learn; Shop; Search. Cart My Account. IZotope Overview Pricing options Pricing Options. Which edition of RX 7 is right for you? Sound design Beat making Browse 5 more. Free plug-ins. And for professionals who need to quickly deliver quality results, the RX 5 Advanced Audio Editor offers even more specialized post-production tools. In this review I will take a look at the new iZotope RX5 Advanced Audio Editor software.
It’s not that often that you stumble upon a great vocal processing plugin.
In fact, if you’re producing or mixing vocals, you’re usually left with a bunch of various plugins that you need to combine to process these vocals properly.
For instance, you’ll need to use separate compressors or limiters, EQs, distortion, saturation, delay, reverb, and other effects.
But wouldn’t it be great to have an all-in-one plugin and not have everything scattered around different softwares?
Well, there are actually some multi-purpose options out there, like iZotope’s Nectar.
In early 2019, iZotope updated their Nectar to the third version, with some graphic interface improvements and various “intelligent” mixing features.
With this move forward, they came closer to some of the most prestigious software on the market these days, raising the standards in the world of vocal processing.
While there are some same effects and options, Nectar 3 does bring some exciting functionalities that its predecessors lacked.
In fact, we could easily say that this version made iZotope a huge breakthrough with all the new additions.
And we’re not the only ones to think that, some legendary producers, such as Mike Dean, producer for 2pac, kanye west, etc etc, have come forward with praise for izotopes vocal processing tool:
It also gets 5 stars from pluginboutique users, with close to 30 reviews:
With all this being said, we figured we could take a closer look, examine Nectar 3, and see what it can actually do.
| iZotope Nectar 3 At a Glance |
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Maker: iZotope Features: Auto Level Mode MIDI Controlled Harmony Parts Vocal Assistant AI RX 7 Breath Control AI learning Modules: Pitch, Gate, EQ, Dynamic Processing, De-esser, Delay Module, Dimension Module, Compressor Module, Saturation Module, Reverb Module CHECK PURCHASE PRICE |
The first important thing we need to note is that Nectar 3 now includes iZotope’s special AI learning, the Vocal Assistant that we can also find on a few other of their products, like Neutron and Ozone.
There are some styles that you can choose right out of the box, like Modern, Vintage, and Dialogue, along with the options for Light, Moderate, and Aggressive intensities.
Nectar 3 then listens to your audio input and does its own custom EQ tweaking, compression, de-essing, level balancing, reverb, and even pitch correction.
As if this wasn’t enough, the Vocal Assistant in Nectar 3 offers even more features for customizing presets for your needs.
Called Unmask, this particular feature works with two tracks. So first, you need to add the Nectar 3 plugin to two tracks and let them work parallel. If they have any corresponding and clashing frequencies, the Unmask feature sorts things out on its own.
This same feature can work with other iZotope plugins that have the Vocal Assistant, like Relay or Neutron.
So the Unmask feature then analyzes these two tracks, and if there’s any frequency matching involved, it adds a static EQ to one of the tracks.
While this is a very useful approach, the downside comes with the fact that you can’t further edit this EQ curve and would need an additional EQ plugin to do some minor tweaking.
This may come as a downside to some, but it’s still a very easy solution. Of course, the Unmask feature can also come in handy for processing and mixing instrument tracks.
The plugin’s EQ now features 24 bands with 16 different shapes.
There are also so-called Dynamic Gain and Dynamic Frequency modes that can assist in dealing with different peaks over the spectrum.
At the same time, the quieter parts stay unaltered in the Dynamic Gain mode.
As for the Dynamic Frequency mode, you can both boost or cut frequencies, all while tracking the nearest moving harmonic peak.
Along with the Nectar 3, we also get the RX7 Breath Control that’s mostly like the Breath Control from the previous version.
With it, you can significantly reduce the volume of all the unwanted breath sounds. The downside here is that it can’t be included into Nectar’s track strip, but rather before or after the Nectar plugin.
There were many advancements with the plugin’s GUI. As a result, the whole interface is more practical and uses all the space better.
The most in-depth and useful guide to this software we’ve found online is by sweetwater, who break down this great piece of software in this 26 minute video:
For many, this is one of the biggest advantages of Nectar 3 as it made things a lot easier for users. This was a significant improvement compared to Nectar 2 where there were many unused empty blocks in the graphic interface.
It’s nothing crucial or spectacular but does make things run smoother. This is especially the case with the EQs, gates, and compressors, where it’s now much easier to dial in everything in detail.
So it’s obvious that we have many other useful additions here compared to the previous versions, like different Saturation modes and even additional voices for the Harmony mode.
But one of the strongest points, at least in our experience, is the pitch editing. Compared to Nectar 2, in the third edition, we have Melodyne Essential by Celemony. But, on the other hand, this particular plugin is not as advanced as some others available out there. It can cover some basic issues with pitch.
Overall, the automatic settings are pretty useful, and you get finalized presets right out of the box.
This makes Nectar 3 pretty useful even for less experienced users. We can also say the same about the Unmask assistant as it does wonders for vocal tracks.
Unfortunately, we weren’t really satisfied with how it performed with different instruments or synths. So it’s a quick solution, maybe not the perfect one for every EQ problem. The same could be said about the Dynamic Frequency feature that helps a lot with vocals but it’s not exactly the best thing for instruments.
While the plugin, overall, is offering some mindblowing features, we’d like to point out that fine-tuning for most of the parameters is not possible.
You’ve got two options when it comes to buying iZotope’s Nectar 3: You can use a rent-to-own service such as splice to pay a monthly fee until you’ve paid the full price, or you can buy it outright from vendors such as pluginboutique, or amazon.
One quick note: with both types of purchase, you’ll get free access to melodyne, a great DAW made by celemony.
At time of publishing, Nectar 3 was retailing at around 250$ for the full purchase, and at 9.99$/ month for the rental.
It’s pretty clear that this is one very diverse and useful package all summed up into one plugin.
Our assessment tells us that it can be a very useful tool both for beginners and professionals.
While every record pressed is a high quality product and will perform flawlessly, there can be some variation in the color throughout a run. Serato scratch live sl2 recording.
In conclusion – this is one mighty fine plugin with so many automated features, something that’s useful for those who don’t feel like bothering with too much tweaking.
One final tip- Groove3 has a great course on iZotope Nectar 3. It contains more than 2 hours of content on this piece of software and it will blow your socks off.
If you do end up buying this plugin, we recommending spending an extra 20$ on the course.
iZotope has released RX 5 Audio Editor, a significant upgrade to their well-stocked toolbox of audio repair software modules (previously at v4). RX 5 adds a number of new repair modules, and brings considerable enhancements to many of its tools, along with additional features that offer greater efficiency and better integration with DAWs.
As before, RX 5 comes in two versions—RX 5 Audio Editor, the standard version (for budget-conscious users) and the more full-featured RX 5 Advanced Audio Editor, which includes additional high-end processing tools (for a full comparison, check the iZotope website and downloadable manual). RX 5 comes as both a standalone application, chock full of processing “modules”, and as a suite of plug-ins in all the standard formats. Both the standard and Advanced versions offer new goodies—some modules (DeReverb) that were previously available only in the Advanced version are now included in the standard version, and certain functions that were standalone-only (Ambience Match) are now available as (AudioSuite) plug-ins as well. For the full list of processing modules in RX 5 Advanced, see Fig 1.
Besides being available as an individual purchase, RX5 Advanced is available as part of iZotope’s new RX Post Production Suite, along with several other tools for handling tasks specific to post-production workflows. The Suite also includes RX Final Mix—a dedicated EQ/Dynamics plug-in intended for use on audio stems in video production (dialog/FX/music). And there’s Insight, iZotope’s comprehensive metering suite, and RX Loudness Control, which automates the task of conforming to broadcast industry standards for loudness. RX 5 Advanced adds its many audio repair tools to these dedicated post-production processors—while they do wonders for music tracks, they’re especially valuable for cleaning up audio in post situations, like problematic location recordings (leakage) or classic dialog issues (ambience, plosives, breaths, etc.).
One of the main areas of improvement has been in workflow efficiency—this takes two forms. Options for automatic processing have been enhanced, resulting in less need for experimenting with settings—many modules that I remember had required a bit more fiddling in the past now seem to get the job done more quickly, with default settings. And workflow can be more streamlined, thanks to features like Instant Processing (of selections) and RX Connect, which makes it easier to bring audio in from the DAW for processing, and send the repaired audio back to the DAW.
Naturally, all of the modules from previous versions of RX are there, and I won’t spend time describing those in any detail—I’ll just focus in on a few of the latest & greatest features.
Of course, RX 5 includes the Spectral Processing (and Deconstruct) modules, which let you graphically select and extract unwanted sound from audio waves, like a pedal squeak in a music track, or a passing siren on a dialogue recording. Now there’s a new mode—Instant Process. Normally, you’d select the unwanted sound in RX’s spectrogram display, select the appropriate module, and process. But if you have a longer recording that has a number of instances of the same problem, you can enable Instant Process, choose the desired processing (from the adjacent popup menu), and now the audio will be processed immediately as you complete each selection, using the current settings for the chosen module (Fig 2).
Fig 2 RX 5’s Instant Process feature (applied to Spectral Repair).
Audio Example 1—RX 5 removes unwanted sound/leakage from two recordings with Spectral Repair via Instant Process mode:
I found that this could really speed things up, especially with repetitive problems, once you’ve determined appropriate settings that work consistently for particular issues.
RX 5’s new Module Chain feature lets you set up a processing chain of several modules, with specific settings for each module in the chain, save this particular configuration as a preset, and then call it up for quick and efficient application of multiple processing.
The modules in a chain have their own unique settings for that chain, independent of the last (default) settings used for them when they were opened up from the main list on the right. Like with Instant Processing, this can be a great time saver for recurring edits, especially useful for dialog editing, where a number of typical dialog issues (pops, breaths, “s”s, clips, room tone, etc.) can be dealt with in a single pass. Again, the key is to save and use a preset with the most appropriate settings for the particular recording(s) you’re dealing with, but as I noted before, the default settings for many of these modules seem to do the trick even without further tweaking.
Two of the most persistent issues, when it comes to vocal and dialog recordings, are sibilance (harsh “s”s) and breath noises. RX 5’s Leveler module now lets you enable automatic handling for both of these, with depth settings for each (again, I found the defaults often worked best). The algorithms identify any problem sibilance and breaths, and make quick work of those flaws, eliminating the need for separate EQ & gating, and cleaning up even a lengthy recording with a single click—a highly useful tool, for both music and post.
Fig 4 The Dialog Leveler, set to fix excessive sibilance (Ess Reduction) and breath sounds (Breath Control).
One of the most annoying flaws in a vocal track can be microphone plosives—those loud thumps that often occur on the letters “p” and “b”—a.k.a. “p-pops”. The new De-Plosive module may not be the flashiest new toy in RX 5’s arsenal, but it can be one of the most welcome. P-pops often require a tedious series of edits or a sometimes dubious application of filtering to get rid of them, but De-Plosive handles all the heavy lifting seamlessly. I’ve often had to address fairly lengthy dialog or vocal recordings with multiple p-pops—especially live vocal tracks made with a hand-held mic—and De-Plosive would have been a godsend. As with many of the new tools, it required little or no fussing with settings—it succeeded on everything I tried it on pretty much out of the box.
Fig 5 The De-Plosive module makes short work of those pesky p-pops (before (top) & after (bottom) processing).
Audio Example 2—A recording with plosives (p-pops) repaired by RX 5’s De-Plosive module:
There are plenty of other enhancements in RX 5 and RX 5 Advanced, but that’s all I have room for here. Whether your area is music or post-production, this swiss army knife collection of tools should be able to handle any problems you throw at it, and this latest version does so with even greater ease and efficiency than ever—definitely a must-have for any serious audio engineer’s toolbox.
Price: RX 5: $349; RX 5 Advanced: $1,199; RX Post Production Suite (incl RX 5 Adv): $1,499
Pros: An incredibly comprehensive and effective suite of audio repair processors that can address almost any task.
Cons: Advanced version is a bit pricey, though it does include a number of very useful extras.
Web:https://www.izotope.com/en/products/post-production/rx-5-audio-editor/
Video Course:RX Audio Repair for Musicians
Here's a video from the course, RX Repair for Musicians, showing how to remove AC hum and buzz from an audio recording: