Anyone Using Neutron?

[Rick Cornish]

Is anyone out there using iZotope Neutron? A good friend of mine whose opinions I value has been singing its' praises.
https://www.izotope.com/en/products/mix/neutron.html

[cuttime]

I tried Neutrino and honestly couldn't tell that it was doing anything at all. If it was designed to be a demo or marketing tool for Neutron, it failed miserably in my book.

[Rick Cornish]

I agree, cuttime, my experience as well, but I'm not asking about Neutrino—this is Neutron, which is another animal entirely. (See link in my original post.)

[billf]

I have Neutron, but it's too early to rate it as I've only had it a couple of days. My initial impressions are that it will be a great tool to have, especially if you like Izotope's other mix/master offerings such as Ozone and RX. It's far deeper than something like Toontrack's EZ Mix. I particularly like the Masking function, that looks very useful.

I've seen some early reviews on YouTube that also look promising.

[mhschmieder]

I'm hoping to use it by early next week, to see how it compares to Alloy, before deleting Alloy from my system. I mostly used Alloy for tom toms, but it had other duties as well. Its replacement has a lot more features though.

Interestingly, I went for the full suit upgrade option, and am finding the vocoder/talkbox/etc. pretty good even if it can't ignore the pitch of the modulator track and just use its formants (my preference). But I haven't played with Neutron itself yet; just Neutrino when it came out.

[Rick Cornish]

The videos on Neutron are really impressive. For a 12-band EQ with 8 parametric bands (+ a "surfer EQ"-like function) + multiband compressor + exciter + transient designer ++, it looks very compelling. And the masking function, where different instances of Neutron can interact across different channels could be the best part of all.

$99, if you own other iZ products.

[dewdman42]

the izotope crossgrade is only $89 at audio-deluxe right now, FYI.

I'm contemplating this one. For me the greatest asset is the masking feature of the EQ.

1. You can link one track to another track and see both EQ curves in one interface
2. the linked tracks are analyzed using proprietary pyscho acoustics stuff to look for so called "masking", which is when the two tracks have overlapping frequencies that cause one track to mask out the other track in certain frequency ranges. This is not always a bad thing, but this EQ mask detector is able to show HOW MUCH masking is happening and when you see a lot of it, you might go in and do further work...
3. You can have an EQ node in one track linked directly to an EQ node on the other track..so that as you raise the level of one, the other one moves inversely.
4. it has built in side chaining and you can put a particular EQ node in so called "dynamic" mode where it expands or compresses those particular frequencies (per the node freq/q), depending on the side chain input from an EQ node on the other track. Which essentially means, if you want to eliminate the aforementioned masking, you can set it up so that it only cuts or boosts frequencies to overcome masking, during the moments when the masking is actually happening..automatically.
5. It also has the learn function to listen to the audio and tries to identify particularly resonate areas on the track that could use some engineering

I'm impressed! A lot of the other stuff I don't really care about, and I don't really want to use it as my complete channel solution, but this masking stuff is very very cool and I can see this tool being very useful to speed through the EQing tasks... Frankly I'm sure my mixes would basically be better because I would do stuff that I'm not even doing now, this tool makes it easy enough to actually do it routinely.

The advanced version is more money but provides a dedicated EQ module with all of that above without all the other neutron fluff, but I don't want to pay more in order to get less, so....I dunno, but anyway I guess we have until the end of the month to get discount, but will look forward to comments from some of you that got it already.

[mikehalloran]

Having both Ozone 7 Advanced and RX 5 Advanced, I pulled the trigger on the Advanced Upgrade to Music Production 2 Bundle. The extra $50 gets me the Vocal Synth that I may or may not use. I suppose, I'll now have additional licenses for the rest of the suite, too.

http://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/MPB2UpAdv

[dewdman42]

Yea I was almost gonna do that too. Its not a bad price. I played around with Neutron demo for a bit in the past couple days, it is definitely very cool, especially the EQ masking feature. That being said, two plugin instances on two tracks broke down my mac into sputtering and coughing and dropping out audio. It uses a LOT of cpu, for what it does. I guess its probably because it has a lot of fancy built in metering going on, I'm not sure. But anyway I bought Waves SSL4000 recently and I'm just gonna keep using that and pass on this. If it wasn't such a resource hog I might consider picking it up for the EQ masking task...and even its kind of fun to run the assistant and see where it detects EQ areas of interest, etc. It will be interesting to watch this product develop though....I will be keeping an eye on it.

[billf]

That being said, two plugin instances on two tracks broke down my mac into sputtering and coughing and dropping out audio. It uses a LOT of cpu, for what it does.

Wow, that's worrisome. What DAW were you using to try it out?

I ran 10 to 12 instances of Neutron this week too test it out at the end of plugin chains, and had no problem with my CPU. I was using it in Logic Pro X though, so I'll give it a go in DP and Pro Tools to see how it holds up on my system.

[dewdman42]

Lpx. It started having problems after i ran the assistant and I notice I had eq compr exciter and shaper active. I read some other reports about this later too.

[billf]

Lpx. It started having problems after i ran the assistant and I notice I had eq compr exciter and shaper active. I read some other reports about this later too.

I will give that a go this week.

[mhschmieder]

The vocal synth is quite good, even if "one shoe doesn't fit all" when it comes to that sort of thing (I am still hoping Fabrice Gabriel will eventually do a 64-bit version of his best-in-class Eiosis ELS Vocoder, which is patterned after the EMS Vocoders of yore).

They had no record of my having "upgraded" to the Music Production Suite last year -- even though I had receipts to prove it -- but it made no difference as the upgrade to the latest suite is the same price for ANY of the qualifying conditions.

In my view, it is well worth going for the suite, as the vocal synth covers a lot of ground. For instance, it includes a highly usable and flexible Talk Box mode that goes way beyond the one in NI Guitar Rig. There isn't much on the market in this category. And aside from standard vocoding, it also includes some other vocal synthesis techniques that are probably (so far) unique to this plugin.

Having owned various TC Electronic harmonizing hardware/powercore/plugin products over the years, I would say that this new one from iZotope far surpasses any of those in quality and features.

[mikehalloran]

- but it made no difference as the upgrade to the latest suite is the same price for ANY of the qualifying conditions.

In my view, it is well worth going for the suite, as the vocal synth covers a lot of ground. For instance, it includes a highly usable and flexible Talk Box mode that goes way beyond ...

I went through "hey, I own all of the qualifying products plus a few more..." before deciding that the price was good anyway and pulled the trigger. If I had owned only RX Advanced, it would have been a hell of a deal to get everything else but, in the end, I think the money is well spent.

I've been having fun with the Vocal Synth although I've not found a project for it (yet?).

[dewdman42]

Vocalsynth is probably better, but vocalizerpro is on sale at pluginbotique right now for 20 bucks (90% off) and I grabbed it, similar kind of tool. I almost got the izotope bundle because it's very great value for what all you get but truthfully I don't need most of it. It's kinda like komplete, lots of value but I never use it. If I were mixing and mastering for a living I would not hesitate though.