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Our intelligent audio technology helps musicians, music producers, and audio post engineers focus on their craft rather than the tech behind it. My initial experiments, especially with Track Assistant, where very impressive and so from my experiences I echo Russ - don’t knock it until you have tried it.At iZotope, we’re obsessed with great sound. The more I use Neutron the less I find myself concerned about the GUI.
Having used it both as individual plugins and as the full plugin I have done a complete U-turn and I am completely sold. I just wanted RX Final Mix back and it is a big plugin window. I concur with Russ that in the post world this is also going to be a Marmite plugin and I have to say that when I first saw Neutron I was sceptical and was concerned that there was way too much going on in the GUI for it to be useful in my post workflow. I do want to spend some more time on the Masking feature to get into it fully but initial thoughts are promising. I also had a quick look at the Masking feature and initial thoughts are this will be another helpful tool to help me do an even better job. Of course you are not tied to these changes but in post where time is so tight because budgets have been squashed I can see this being a great help in preping tracks and stems as a mix assistant, from 'back in the day' would have done. I repeated the Track Assistant on the music and FXs stems, where again it analysed the audio and then made subtle changes. That said I am counting the days until I have that same feature in RX ) Having satisfied myself of this simpler workflow and jumped back into the full Neutron plugin and set up three instances on a 5.1 session and was very pleased to see proper 5.1 instances of Neutron and the individual plugins in my plugin list. I found it in the separate plugins as each of the modules in Neutron is also available as a separate plugin, so I could choose to use just the Neutron EQ module on my stems. My first impressions were that were for post users there was a lot in Neutron that we wouldn't be using especially as Neutron is not a small plugin, with two instances side by side won't fit in my 1920x1080 screen. IZotope have worked hard at how Neutron looks and how best to use the screen real estate as there is so much going on in Neutron. There is a true peak limiter built into the input/output and metering stage which makes keeping true peaks in check very easy. I first tried to use Neutron as I would use RX Final Mix and I found the EQ section was even better than RX Final Mix and the GUI is easier to read and easier to use too. Mike's Thoughts On Neutron From A Post Perspective Some of you are going to love Neutron, some are going to hate it - all I would say is don’t knock it until you have tried it. I happen to think it’s a very smart piece of audio technology and what you would expect from iZotope. I don’t happen to think it is instead I think this is going to do for mixing what RX did for restoration. Some are going to think this is a channel strip equivalent of auto tuning, and we all know how much that divides opinion.
I’m torn, I don’t subscribe entirely to either point of view, it depends which way the wind is blowing if I’m really honest. The second reason I know some people will not like the concept is because for some the very idea of carving frequencies out in mixes is a bad idea. This is another moment when technology is giving us a helping hand. Is it cheating? Only in the same way that driving is cheating when you can walk or a washing machine is cheating instead of washing your clothes by hand.
Anyone who has graded images or movies on a pro application will be used to metering options that help show light and hue - Neutron for me is the same thing. Does this mean it takes away the craft and art of mixing? Not at all, it simply helps identify areas that you can work with.
So why do I think people are going to hate it? A couple of reason, the first one is that it automates some features that until now have been a manual task.