Izotope Rx 7 Review
RX Advanced is iZotope’s flagship audio-correction/fixing application. A couple of versions ago, the app became a true editor with the ability to record and edit audio and to fix, correct and adjust using sophisticated machine learning algorithms. As with all technology, the app continuously evolves and improves, and the latest version, RX 7 Advanced, is now capable of intelligently identifying vocals, bass, percussion and other instruments in a mix. In addition, RX 7 Advanced now also supports surround sound.
RX 7 Advanced. Designed specifically for the demanding needs of post production professionals, RX 7 Advanced continues to lead the audio post production industry with powerful restoration tools used in major film and television projects worldwide. Trusted by the top audio pros around the world, RX 7 continues to lead advances in audio signal processing and machine learning that were once unimaginable. RX 7 Advanced features exclusive tools that are used daily in professional post production houses, including the revolutionary Dialogue Isolate, De-rustle, De-wind, and Spectral Repair.
The RX interface gives users a synthesized overview of recorded audio, with the waveform in blue on top of the sound’s spectral information. In order to understand exactly what you’re fixing or editing, you need to understand that the waveform only represents the sound’s volume, whereas the spectrograph shows the sound’s energy, i.e. the different frequencies, harmonics, etc. You can process a complete file or selections of it.
With RX 6 Advanced, you could change music in ways that sound perfectly natural — not a hint of having done it in software. With RX 7 Advanced, you can do the same to dialogue. In fact, RX 7 Advanced is so good at correcting imperfections in recordings, in many cases you will be able to use it as a faster and cheaper alternative to ADR.
RX 7 Advanced with Dialogue: an Alternative to ADR
I quickly realized this when I experimented with the Dialogue Contour module. When I’m recording a video tutorial for some app, I have a tendency to increase my voice’s pitch as I approach the last part, but then realize I still need to add a closing thought. Often, that turns out to be totally uncalled for — at which point I find myself with an end that sounds like it’s a question.
The only fix so far has been to start over again or record a voiceover. That’s hard to synchronize with the rest of the video without software like VocAlign or Revoice Pro. With RX 7 Advanced’s Dialogue Contour, however, I can now just lower my voice in the module, and you won’t hear that it was not recorded that way, no matter how hard you try.
With RX 7 Advanced, you can also isolate or remove dialogue or vocals from music. When in a video of a restaurant with background music, for example, the dialogue is hard to hear, you can fix that with Music Rebalance. This also allows you to create instrumental (or acapella) versions of songs by removing the vocal elements and isolating the vocals from the background music. I had my doubts about this, but after trying it out myself with different settings, I am truly astonished that it works so well. I could even isolate Cecilia Bartoli’s voice from the violins in an aria on The Salieri Album. Admittedly, with the default setting there was a tiny bit of bleeding from those violins in her voice. But a bit of experimenting with the slider delivered a pure vocal signal.
De-Reverb is a module that has been available in RX Advanced for some time, but now there’s also Dialogue De-Reverb for removing unwanted reverb from dialogue clips using an algorithm optimized for a “spoken signal”. I tried that with a recording of an announcement over the intercom by a museum guide in a cathedral. That didn’t work because the signal was 99% reverberation. However, speaking myself in a microphone in that same cathedral worked much better than I could have imagined. This module, too, could be used in place of ADR.
Surround Sound
RX 7 Advanced now also supports 7.1.2 multichannel surround sound. It lets you work on multichannel projects by toggling between all channels in one view or displaying a summed view. You can also turn individual channels on and off, summing only the ones you want to work on.
Finally, iZotope’s RX 7 Advanced has assistive audio technology. This module is an intelligent repair tool that can detect noise, clipping, clicks, and more. It’s designed to speed up correction and edits. All you need to do is select the type of material (music, dialogue, other) and let RX 7 Advanced analyze the audio. The Repair Assistant then offers different suggestions for processing, using multiple modules, as well as three different intensities for each.
Your task is reduced to reviewing and auditioning, hitting Render, and letting Repair Assistant perform its magic.
I found the Repair Assistant to be really helpful with certain audio files and less so with others. Unfortunately — and as far as I could see — there’s no fixed rule to determine whether or not files are suitable to run through the Repair Assistant. The only rule I could deduce was that, if the audio has many sudden, unexpected artifacts that you can’t categorize as noise, clipping or clicks — and certainly when they sound like they’re really part of the signal you want to rescue — Repair Assistant sometimes isn’t going to cut it. Yet. I expect it to keep improving in future releases.
Insight 2
Besides RX 7, iZotope also upgraded its audio analysis tool, Insight. Insight 2 works in tandem with an iZotope plug-in, Relay, that allows you to monitor the interaction of two or more tracks or channels with the track you’re analyzing. If you insert an Insight 2 instance on the Master track, you can analyze up to eight different tracks upstream.
Insight 2 has new features as well. For example, the Intelligibility module allows you to measure whether your dialogue mix holds up in different listener environments. With the Intelligibility meter inserted on the master track, you can ensure that a dialogue is clearly understandable in low, medium and high noise environments. How those are defined remains somewhat obscure, although it does work as you’d expect. The meter requires that a Relay instance, which is inserted on a track or bus that feeds into the master output, be selected as the Source instance.
Another module that can tap into the Relay feature is the Spectrogram (2D or 3D), which provides a spectral representation of audio varying over time, allowing you to analyze individual elements within a mix. It can display data for up to eight sources simultaneously by selecting Relay instances in the source selection menu.
As with RX 7 Advanced, Insight 2 supports surround sound. For example, you can monitor the loudness of your surround sound mixes with support for Dolby Atmos 7.1.2 track configurations, but you can also monitor the surround sound field with a surround scope that shows the amplitude of surround channels. The Surround Scope not only monitors the phase relationship between neighboring audio channels, but also displays an alert when there is a negative correlation or phase cancellation taking place.
Conclusion
The RX 7 Advanced upgrade focuses on the human voice in both musical and noisy environments. It succeeds brilliantly at extracting vocal signals for you to manipulate. The vocal capabilities of RX 7 Advanced are so good that you can use RX 7 Advanced to fix dialogue instead of performing ADR.
Both RX 7 Advanced and Insight 2 now support surround sound, which makes them very suitable for cinema and video. Combined with the rather spectacular results you may expect from the machine-learning algorithms, there are now numerous cases which you don’t really need an experienced sound engineer for anymore.
In short, both apps deserve at least a closer look — a demo download is available — after which I think you will find them both must-haves.
Mighty RX, a complete suite for audio repair, has just been updated to version 7, with additions, enhancements, and much more. This huge, complex, precise suite just got bigger.
by Vincenzo Bellanova, Nov. 2018
An Incredible Suite
The renowned RX suite just got a major update, with several new improvements and additions. iZotope RX7 is an absolute essential suite, no matter if you’re working on music, field recording, sound design or audio post production, it can save not only a lot of time (avoiding re-recording), but it can literally fix problems transparently in most cases. Noise, mouth clicks, lavalier rustle, hum, wind rumbles, digital clicks, crackles, plosives and breaths, as well as less exoteric operations like levelling, normalizing, resampling, and this on one or more files, on the whole audio file or just in a time or frequency selection. The scenarios in which RX can operate are countless, but what is important to note is that we have everything in the same workspace if we’re focusing on repair, or we can open single plugins in our DAW for fast fixes. RX7 plugins are now available as AudioSuite plugins too, and the family just got bigger, as we will see.
A great number of videos, and the new Repair Assistant, will make corrections even easier, showing you the essential techniques, problems and how to fix them. The different versions of RX also offer flexibility in terms of needs, price and use. RX is getting closer and closer to musicians, and the new Music Rebalance module is a demonstration of the attention iZotope pays to the different targets.
In this review we will focus only on the new elements, but if you’re new to the RX world, you might be interested in reading more about what is RX and its amazing modules in the two previous reviews on the Soundbytes Magazine website.
RX 5: https://soundbytesmag.net/rx5-by-izotope/
RX 6 Advanced: https://soundbytesmag.net/review-rx6-advanced-from-izotope/
What’s New
As anticipated, the list is not short, starting from a light UI refinement, to multichannel support and, of course, entire new modules.
(See below for a workaround.).2. After 19 third-party libraries are added, the Omnisphere Patch Categories list will be incomplete. 3rd party music. If the number of third-party patch libraries exceeds this number, Omnisphere's search function will be impaired.3. There is a limit to how many libraries can be listed in Omnisphere's DIRECTORY without truncating Omnisphere Patch categories. NOTE: This issue only affects Omnisphere 1, it has been resolved in Omnisphere 2.With the large number of third-party Omnisphere patch libraries avaiable, it's important to be aware that there are some limitations to how Omnisphere can function with them.1.
Pro Tools users now can enjoy Dialogue Isolate, De-rustle, Breath Control and the new Music Rebalance modules as AudioSuite plugins. AudioSuite is a Pro Tools format of audio plugins which can be used on a single audio clip or on multiple clips at once instead of on an insert track. The processing through AudioSuite plugins needs to render the processed files, replacing the clips we treated with new ones.
Multichannel is now supported up to 7.1.2 (10 channels) Dolby Atmos, meaning that you can process one or all the channels with the same module and in just one instance. Such a powerful new feature that will further speed up the work of audio engineers working on films or where multichannel audio is required.
Dialogue Isolate and De-Rustle modules’ performance has been enhanced, starting from the new Preview function for checking their operations on the go.
Another important new feature is the possibility to select a frequency range of action for the modules directly in the Module Chain. This truly gives extra power to the Module Chain, allowing to arrange even more specific corrections per single module.
New Modules
Let’s start from the new Dialogue Contour module, which is designed to shape and modify the pitch and inflexion of dialogue parts. Intonation and inflexion are obviously fundamental (not to mention that in some languages they have a distinctive function, and can alter the entire meaning of a word). In some languages, like Italian, for instance, intonation might distinguish an affirmative sentence from an interrogative sentence, because the position of the terms is the same in both cases. Linguistics apart, perfecting inflection before could involve micro pitch shifting or formant shifting using automation or external tools. Now we are just a few clicks away from our goal. Insert the module, isolate a section or the entire file and create your custom curve by adding, moving or deleting individual points, and smoothen the final result. Formant scaling is also available in order to shift specific resonances or attenuations in the spectrum, respecting the natural formants of the human speech.
Dialogue De-Reverb is the new module specifically designed for removing reverb from voice. RX also has a De-Reverb module, but the new one does not require to learn the reverb profile, and it is based on machine learning algorithms. Particularly useful both in audio post, if we don’t have the chance to get our interview in a proper room, or in music production, if we need to record vocals in a reverberant environment. Its controls include Sensitivity and Ambient Preservation in order to balance the result and to identify how much of the incoming signal can be considered as reverb.
Variable Time and Variable Pitch allow the user to select a portion of the audio file and design a custom shape for pitch or time variations in the same way we described for the Dialogue Contour module. What deserves attention here, is the incredible, crystalline audio quality of these tools. Not to mention that these can absolutely wink an eye to Sound Design. I tested Variable Pitch on an entire song, with both time changes and Preserve Time enabled (with the first, the module will behave like a Tape play head changing pitch and speed of the file), and I barely heard artifacts, even with generous pitch variations. Here, too, possible applications are countless, from extreme pitch shifting on raw sound sources to morph them into bizarre effects, or gentle shifts with time changes which reminded me of the old days of sampling material for musical purposes. Pitch Coherence and Transient Sensitivity controls appear on both the modules, allowing for timbre and transient preservation.
Last but not least, the Music Rebalance module, which created a quite a stir when first announced. People are probably asking if it’s true that it can remove vocals from a song or an instrumental leaving just vocals. The answer is yes. Simply divided in Voice, Bass, Percussion and Other, Music Rebalance allows us to set the Sensitivity of the analysis, letting know the module how much of the incoming signal should be considered as Bass, Vocal, etc., and we can set the gain for each of the parts. Low Sensitivity values can reach precise results by completely muting tiny parts of other instruments that might come in the analysis, but at the cost of small artifacts, while if we are after complete clarity, higher values can eliminate glitches, but other instruments might end up in the result. Sometimes reverb can be an enemy of Music Rebalance, probably because of the long tails which can be confused with the voice or the behavior of other instruments. But despite some artifacts, Music Rebalance works very well and it is capable of extracting a cappella voices from an entire song which is more than useable.
Apart from the vocal extraction, Music Rebalance’s main role, I think, resides in other uses, like an intelligent way to give space to various sections, moving entire instruments inside or outside the mix. Or it can completely reshape a song with problems, and in this, Music Rebalance excels, especially for the idea of changing the balance of a track with just a few and intuitive parameters. When everything seems lost, and we probably are in front of a single WAV file, without the possibility of touching any fader in the DAW, it can save the day.
Izotope Rx-7 Review
Repair Assistant
Probably the most interesting addition to the whole Suite, Repair Assistant can intelligently analyze an audio file, identify problems and suggest corrections. In the top right of the RX7 standalone interface, just click on the Repair Assistant tab to engage this tool. It is absolutely wonderful to have a personal assistant which will analyze and possibly speed up even more the work. Repair assistant will ask if the file contains musical, dialogue or other material, then starts the analysis searching for clipping, clicks, hum and noise. In the settings, we can also customize its analysis bypassing one of the problems, for instance, we can exclude the hum analysis.
Clever, fast and powerful, Repair Assistant is another magical element in RX that will make the entire suite even easier and quicker to use, and I personally love how smart plugins are becoming lately. Surely, this won’t mean that the human touch is completely bypassed, and the ability to identify problems, solve them, tweak the modules, is still required, but Repair Assistant can work as a huge “learn” function on the entire audio file, allowing us to complete a task in a matter of clicks.
There’s more, and this is another great proof of flexibility: if problems are found, Repair Assistant will purpose three different solutions, each of them containing a different module chain, so different modules arranged in various ways. Below the various solutions, labelled as A, B and C, if we click on the faders icon, we can set the intensity of the corrections, which is like controlling the overall Dry/Wet of the modules, or, if we aren’t satisfied and we want to use the Repair Assistant’s suggestions as a starting point, we can open the module chains and tweak the single module’s parameters to taste.
Conclusion
RX7 confirms itself as a must have tool of incredible value, for its vast array of modules, precision, clarity and true gems like the possibility to arrange, save and recall entire chains. Absolutely suggested for everyone who is looking for saving, preserving or “only” asking more for their files. Pro Tools users can now enjoy more AudioSuite tools, and engineers working on multichannel files can be enthusiast too. Having a look around, lately the word Ambisonics is popping out more and more, this is the direction I really hope the next RX will take.
Since my latest review of RX (version 6), I must confess I have used the suite almost daily on both musical and sound design jobs, easily rescuing a lot of files, and rarely opening the manual again because of intuitive functions of this software. Now, with the Repair Assistant, these operations will be even quicker.
The new modules and improvements add some shine to the whole tool, especially Music Rebalance, getting even closer to musicians. I think it will be perfected, analyzing and isolating the various parts even better in the future. Separating single instruments from a track wasn’t something I was thinking about very often before seeing this module. I can just guess what will come next. Variable Pitch and Time, let’s say it again, are tools that easily adapt to musical and Sound Design applications, with a really impressive quality.
Izotope Rx 7 Free Download
iZotope RX7 is available in different versions: RX Elements ($129.00 USD), RX7 Standard ($299.00 USD), RX7 Advanced ($1199.00 USD) and it is also included in the Post Production Suite 3 ($1499.00 USD), bundled with Insight 2, Neutron Advanced 2 and Tonal Balance Control. RX7 Advanced is available for both Mac and PC platform, 32 and 64 bits, in 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) format.
Supported plugin hosts: Audition CC 2017, Cubase 9, Final Cut Pro 10, Live 9, Logic Pro X, Media Composer 8.8, Nuendo 7, Premiere Pro CC 2017, Pro Tools 10-12, Studio One 3.
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