iZotope RX
Meet your audio's new primary care physician
After long-admiring (and recommending) iZotope's dynamic, comprehensive and surprisingly affordable mastering plugin, Ozone, I was excited to investigate iZotope's restoration offering, iZotope RX. While no one should record inferior audio thinking they can fix it later, there are always times in which even the best practitioners have less control over their source material than they would like. Enter RX.
When "restoring," it is important to remember that restoration entails the compromise of trying to make "it" better than it becomes worse in the course of trying to make it better. Just as with a doctor prescribing medicine, "remedies" include side-effects, and, with this in mind, a physician prescribes to achieve the greatest amount of wanted results with the fewest un-wanted developments.
iZotope RX works in this way and endows users with 5 primary prescriptions:
- Declipper for "[rebuilding] clipped auido from overloaded A/D converters and analog gear."
- Declicker for "[eliminating] clicks, crackles, pops and digital impulse noises."
- Hum Removal for "[cleaning] up electrical hum and line noise."
- Denoiser for "[removing] broadband noise with natural sounding results." i.e. from reel-to-reel tape or audio or video cassette.
- Spectral Repair for "[fixing] intermittent noises, corrupted intervals, and even gaps in audio."
In turn, "RX is ideal for audio restoration and archiving, recording and mastering, broadcasting and pod-casting, video production, forensics, and any application that demands flawless audio." It's almost overwhelming when one realizes just how many sonic applications that ultimately entails and how frequently that can make RX relevant.
 Downloading and installing RX proved effortless. Windows and Mac platforms are both supported with Pro Tools 7+ (RTAS/ AudioSuite), VST, MAS, Audio Unit, DirectX plugin formats available. RX can also be used as a standalone application (sans DAW) and different situations will clearly call for either approach. Either way, RX is steeped in visual appreciation of sonic events in the form of a multi-perspectival spectrogram. This means that you can visually analyze your audio in a plethora of ways and, with time, become proficient in identifying, at a glance, what needs what kind of attention. This and other RX visual aids can tremendously speed up your workflow and assist in achieving precise results. Indeed, sitting down to the spectrogram with my 5 prescriptions in tow, I seriously felt like I was about to get "medieval" on some audio.
 First, I thought to remove the background noise of sand-blasting from a video shoot I recently recorded audio for on the (occasionally noisy) coast of Maine. This was as straightforward as retrieving "Denoiser," identifying the sound of the "noise" to the application (called "training") and then removing it to taste. How great is that?
Satisfied, I then turned my attention to distortion from that same (documentary) video shoot. There were, unfortunately, numerous instances of clipping while rapidly transitioning a boom mic between numerous sources, all of which demanded adjustments that were impossible to perform in real-time without a clip here or there. RX solved that problem for me as well with "Declipper." It was as easy as setting threshold and makeup gain and clicking "apply."
 Now that I had minimized my background noise and addressed the clipping in the recorded dialogue, I then summoned RX's 4 band, fully-parametric EQ to make a subtle upper-mid frequency boost that placed the vocals light years ahead of where they used to sit in the mix.
Finally, I utilized "Declicker" to kidnap a few instances of the XLR cable slapping against the boom pole. By the time I finished this, the project was revolutionized and my mind was racing to all the non-post-oriented tasks I could perform such as cleaning up the vinyl I had digitized for DJing, regulating that pesky clip embedded into an otherwise sublime sample I've been dying to use and performing some advanced-mastering on the new Podcast DJ mix I had just created. This too all proved readily achievable. I consequently anticipate RX becoming a new staple of my workflow; I just don't know how someone could experience this degree of control and not crave it forever after. It's really that simple.
So is using RX. I accomplished all the aforementioned exercises (including installation) within my first hour of exposure to the software and essentially felt fluent without delay. I also enjoyed working with the spectrogram and other visualization tools and can tell just how much I will come to rely on them.
In conclusion, as with Ozone, RX has me impressed by how capable I feel within one workspace. Additionally, I can recommend it with confidence for "any application that demands flawless audio" and can also attest that you won’t find a comparable solution at a comparable price. I’m truly excited to see just how good I can get at "restoration" and now know which solution I will employ.
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