iZotope’s RX6 is best known as a collection of tools dedicated to audio repair and restoration, but it can be an absolute time-saver in music production as well.

How Select Region Izotope Rx Elements Trial

Select “iZotope RX” located in your Applications folder and click “Open.” RX is now set as your Sample Editor. To edit audio from Ableton Live in RX: Click “Edit” in the Clip View window. Your Clip will now automatically open in RX. When your edits in RX are complete, simply select File - Overwrite Original File.

by Vincenzo Bellanova, Mar. 2018

The well-known iZotope brought its audio repair suite to the next level with the 6th version, offering brand new features, improvements and modules. RX6 is more of a collection of tools dedicated to the audio repair and restoration. It is a complete working environment that allows you to save hours of work, and it is not dedicated just to the post production in the film/documentary soundtrack area. RX6 is an absolute time-saver in music production as well, and, as I personally tested while making sample libraries, even in file management with its batch processing function that allows the import of entire folders of samples and the application of multiple modules or simply the resampling of all the files to a new sample rate – all that in a blink of an eye.

When recording outside, wind, microphone movement or excessive reverb in some locations can compromise the quality or the intelligibility of an audio take. Or it can happen to occur due to mouth clicks, excessively loud breaths, thundering and distracting plosives when recording vocals, click tracks or amplifier hums captured accidentally by our microphone. In RX6 you can find the perfect solution to almost every accident that can happen in a recording in one of its modules, and all of them truly take care of the problem without affecting the quality of the main audio material. Black magic.

As previously stated, RX6 is more than the simple collection of its modules. Its clear interface with the selection tools allows great precision when it comes to visualizing and isolating problems, extending a selection of a single frequency to the upper harmonics in a click and finding similar events. Module settings can be saved as presets, and a particular set of modules can be saved as a module chain for maximum speed when working on similar situations. And as if this was not enough, the new Composite View permits to process the same section of multiple files in a single window.

All that said, it is important to remember that paying a attention during the recording session can help to avoid a lot of work later. But, if the magic of a performance can’t be reproduced, or the same cast cannot make another take, or the recording of a documentary outside in hard conditions can’t exclude some issues, RX6 comes in handy, literally saving an unreproducible piece of work.

Basics and Interface

As mentioned earlier, RX6 works with modules, utilities that are dedicated to affect our audio material in a specific way to solve a problem. You can operate with these modules within the standalone version of RX, or use them as plugins in your DAW, but not all of them are available in all the RX versions (we will see the Advanced features later).

Importing audio is really easy: a simple drag and drop will let us visualize in the main window both the waveform and its relative spectrogram, with the time on the X axis, the frequencies on the Y axis, and the intensity of the color (orange being more intense according to the default settings, but it can be changed to our taste) representing the intensity. Within the spectrogram we can have a clearer and more immediate feedback on what is happening in our sample: if we have, for instance, a tonal background noise with a constant pitch, we will see a continuous horizontal line over the X axis, in a specific region or across the whole file. We could also change the balance between the waveform and spectrogram visualization with a little slider on the left, right under the spectrogram.

The interface in this new version hasn’t seen too many changes, and as in RX5, moving to the right, we will find some scaling settings, a vertical volume meter in dB, the frequency scale and the spectrogram scale. We can change the scales by right clicking everywhere on one of the numbers displayed. The default Mel frequency scale, for example, can be easily changed to Extended Log to better visualize the lower content of the audio material, and consequently better visualize and isolate the problems.

The rightmost column hosts the modules, divided into Repair, proper repair tools, Utilities, like normalize or tools for gain, EQ and phase adjustments, and Measurements, for deeper technical information about our sample.

In the lower bar are located the transport controls, a meter, and the selection tools: time selection tool, with which you can isolate a time region including all the frequencies, time frequency selection tool, allowing us to select freely a frequency and time region, frequency selection tool, which isolates a specific frequency range across the whole file, and some other useful tools, like the lasso, select harmonic and the brush and the magic wand, which automatically selects similar harmonic content of an already highlighted region.

A really useful feature that will save extra time is the Instant Process, available in the Standard and Advanced version of RX6: apply the process selected in the drop down menu (Attenuate, De-Click, Fade, Gain and Replace) instantly when selecting a region. The default settings of these operations can be changed opening the relative module.

New Modules

Covering all the modules and functions would take a long time and it is not the main purpose of this review, but luckily, iZotope provides a good online manual and a great list of tutorials, with each video showing how to solve a specific problem.

iZotope improved some of the existing modules in this new version, like the Ambience Match, Center Extract, Deconstruct, De-Plosive, Voice De-Noise, De-Click and the Find Similar function, and added several brand new modules: Breath Control, De-Bleed, De-Ess, De-Rustle, De-Wind, Mouth De-Click and Dialogue Isolate.

The Breath Control module intelligently detects only the breaths in the audio files, and allows us to attenuate them. This can be a huge time saver in music production when vocal editing can be a long process. The “Output breaths only” checkbox permits to listen to the breaths, in order to check if some other material is being identified as breath or if we need to adjust the sensitivity to capture some quieter noises.

The De-Ess module does exactly what it says, can attenuate the frequencies of sibilants, or can be used to adjust the spectrum of the overheads if their high end is too harsh.

The Dialogue Isolate is one of my favorite modules. Recognizing the spectral profile and the harmonic content of the speech, it can help to attenuate the background noises like traffic or crowds, and increase to volume of the dialogue, which will obviously benefit in clarity.

The Mouth De-Click module is dedicated to lip-smacks and other mouth clicks that can be recorded if the performer, for instance, is too close to the microphone.

De-Rustle is particularly useful with Lavalier microphones recordings, as it can attenuate and suppress the noise caused by brushing or hitting the microphone, and the De-Wind module, as the name suggests, take care of the low frequency noise caused by the wind.

Lastly, there’s the De-Bleed module. It sometimes happens that a signal leaks into another, for instance. How many times, after recording a vocal track, we can hear the click in the background? Sometimes it can be fixed with standard editing, but when the click occurs right on the vocal, it can be a real problem. This module works by removing the bleed problem from the recording, and it needs two tracks: the active track, with our recorded content, also containing the bleed problem, and the bleed source track, (just the click track, for instance). Those must be perfectly aligned and at the same sample rate (if not, the resample utility can solve the issue in a few seconds).

New Functions

In this new version of RX, alongside the other formats, we can finally export our work in MP3 format, for lighter files or drafts.

How Select Region Izotope Rx Elements 2

Another powerful and really useful feature is the composite view. Sometimes an issue like a noise like a ringing phone or some other disturbing element can be caught by multiple microphones. In that case we would have to correct all of the takes that present the problem. We can import multiple files, as before, but now RX lets us join them in order to visualize all of the audio content in a single window, isolate and correct a problem applying a module to all of the tracks in a single step, without processing the files individually. To fold (or unfold) the files in the composite, view, all we have to do is click on the dedicated “enter composite view” button.

Managing the Module List, or our presets, becomes even easier with the new Module List View, which allows to create a preset showing in the module columns just the tools we use the most, by simply checking or unchecking the relative boxes.

The practice section on the iZotope web page is something that deserves mention, not only because it not includes an overview but also a lot of videos covering almost every common issue we might encounter. It’s also merits attention because audio samples are provided in .zip files that we can download and use for practice along with the video, and this is a really meaningful concept that makes the learning curve less formidable.

iZotope guides: https://www.izotope.com/en/support/support-resources/guides.html

Tutorials with .zip files included: https://www.izotope.com/en/products/repair-and-edit/rx/practice.html

RX6 Help: https://s3.amazonaws.com/izotopedownloads/docs/rx610/en/index.html

How Select Region Izotope Rx Elements Review

Conclusions

iZotope has again raised the standards with this new version of RX, and it’s really hard to find something as powerful and complete, especially at the same price, which can seem quite high (for the Advanced Version), but all the features and modules, once explored, perfectly justify it.

RX6 is simply magnificent in many ways. First of all, the modules are incredibly precise and deliver clean and amazing results. It is impressive how it can completely delete a problem without affecting the core audio material. The workflow and its functions are improved, and with the MP3 export we can also use it as an audio converter. The Find Similar events, now more powerful, can save a lot of time. The Module List view and the ability to save your own presets comes really in handy when treating similar audio content, especially if you record in the same situations and you know that a certain problem will inevitably occur. Lastly, and this is something that it is worth pointing out, RX6 can be a great tool for audio editing in a more standard way. The instant process with the fades is so useful and quick, and all of the utilities modules are great to cover every aspect of audio treatment, like EQ adjustments or EQ matching, resampling functions, phase alignments, loudness metering, and much more. The learning curve can be steep, but the free tutorials on iZotope’s site will speed up the process and provide a more precise idea of how RX works and when to use it.

RX6 is definitely a must have, it is a great tool not only for the film post production or dialogue editing, but also for the music recording and production.

iZotope RX6 can run on both Mac and PC as a standalone software, and, as a plugin suite, supports multiple formats like AAX (64-bit), Audiosuite DPM, Audio Unit (32-bit and 64-bit), RTAS (32-bit), VST 2 (32-bit and 64-bit), and VST 3 (32-bit and 64-bit). RX6 is available in three different versions: RX Elements ($129 USD), RX 6 Standard ($399 USD), RX 6 Advanced ($1,199 USD), and it is included in iZotope’s RX6 Post-Production Suite 2, which includes Neutron Advanced 2, RX Loudness Control and Insight, a metering suite ($1,499 USD).

Avid has partnered with iZotope to offer current Pro Tools Subscribers with a loyalty copy of iZotope RX Elements. This offer ends 7th May 2018.

From what we can tell, this offer is only available to Pro Tools users with an active subscription or Software Update + Support Plan. If you are already an active user, RX Elements is available now in your Avid account My Products and Subscriptions.

Izotope Rx Reviews

If you are not currently on an active plan but would like to take advantage of this offer you must either sign up for a new Pro Tools subscription plan or reinstate your Software Update + Support Plan.

The iZotope RX Elements installer is not hosted on the Avid website. Under your Avid account > My Products you will find a product serial number along with a link to the iZotope website where the installation instructions can be found.

iZotope RX Elements

iZotope describes RX Elements as an essential audio repair toolkit that includes:

• Standalone editing application
• Voice De-noise
• De-clip
• De-click
• De-hum

RX Elements is a budget-friendly version of RX designed for small home studios that need the basics worth $129. Check your Avid account to see if you have this available to you.

Ozone Elements Izotope

For more information about both this loyalty offer and RX Elements please visit the iZotope website