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Have you played around with iZotope IRIS?


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Hey gang,

 

 

Have you played around with iZotope's latest offering, a synth called IRIS?

It uses the "wave hybrid" concept first seen in Camel CAMELEON, along with the "draw-directly-upon-the-spectrogram" concept first seen in Adobe AUDITION.

 

The result is a very interesting new way to create sounds "never before heard by human ears". Say a patch that is a "grand piano + water gurgling + woman humming". You decide--- draw in--- what sonic features of each of those WAV's you wish to contribute to the sound over the period of its envelope... in stereo... distributed over your keys. Naturally the synth offers a good deal of onboard post FX to doctor up the sound.

 

I really like the GUI... with little auto-hide panels on each of the four sides, it's very intuitive to use from the moment you open it.... which means the learning curve is very small indeed.

 

A fun little toy. They offer demos of it at the site. I notice horror movie soundtracks use sounds like these often... when they want to convey the idea of "people in hell". :lol:

 

[video=youtube;VzUxOojmoiY]

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Now here's something I wonder about, with the IRIS (and other apps where you draw directly onto your spectrogram with a stylus). How is it we're not getting some ugly audio artifacts when the FFT spectrogram is sliced-and-diced?

 

 

[ATTACH=CONFIG]345634[/ATTACH]

 

 

 

 

For example, in this attached photo, a waveform has been drawn upon with an eraser... erasing a blank path through the waveform. The resulting patch sounds smooth, pleasant, "musical". But if you were to, let's say, notch out those regions with a parametric equalizer, you'd be liable to get some ugly chirping or sibilance, necessitating an adjustment of your Q-slope.

 

I just wonder how drawing and erasing upon this spectrogram/WAV sounds so smooth and "musical".

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I'll find out soon....just downloaded it
:)

 

As I mentioned, Craig, you'll find it's easy... to assemble a patch which you might call "Damned Souls In Hell". I mixed 1). Woman moaning with 2). Dentist drill with 3). Sea lions barking The result, if you play a low note? A very good "Damned Souls In Hell" patch.

 

 

On a serious note, I am intrigued with the "Magic Wand" feature... You click a particular frequency "smudge" on your FFT Spectrogram, and the wand is a "smart" feature which knows how to select the overtones pertaining to your initial mouseclick.

 

Let us know what sounds you come up with.

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I have it. I have not played with it much in the little more than 2 weeks that I have had it. It has some interesting patches....... and granted I have not played around with the deep editing, you know if it is Izotope it is deep...and good........ but the patches I have dicked with so far.....are not really feel good like say the patches in Omnisphere.

 

What intrigues me about this is the idea of recording your own sounds and importing them for editing. When I am on location we go into some insane environments for sound and noise. I want to get a Zoom or whatever to capture some of these.

 

I think Iris will work phenomenally as a sound sculpting/design tool.

 

I wanted to get the extra two libraries but ended up being so undecided about Iris itself that I did not. I also wanted to get it while it was $100 off the regular price.

 

Yeah the wand feature is like the lasso/wand tools in Photoshop isn't it? The sample is presented in the UI and you can set loop points anywhere within that. Then you can select a portion of it. With the lasso thingy you can grab say a blob shape or an hourglass shape...any shape and it will play the frequencies within that shape and the outer edges of the sahpe are kinda the lopp points. So the cursor goes along as it plays, in the timeline...and when it gets to the other edge.....it bops back to the beginning. Very cool.

 

RX2 has that wand feature as well, for selecting noisy parts for cleaning up, in an audio spectrogram. That is one of the best pieces of software I have ever bought. Very powerful. Ozone 5, which I have had since v3....rounds out my Izotope software other than the free Vinyl. I really wanted to get Nectar while it was on sale but I hesitated pulling the trigger and the offer was over.

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but the patches I
have
dicked with so far.....are not really feel good like say the patches in Omnisphere.


What intrigues me about this is the idea of recording your own sounds and importing them for editing. When I am on location we go into some insane environments for sound and noise. I want to get a Zoom or whatever to capture some of these.


I think Iris will work phenomenally as a sound sculpting/design tool.



 

 

 

I agree that the presets don't show the capabilities of IRIS very well, better to use it as an experimental sound design tool instead of a soft synth IMO.

IRIS reminds me a lot of U&I Software's MetaSynth. Unfortunately, as slick as MetaSynth is, it is near impossible to get usable, predictable results from it, other than just by random. I'm seeing a similar problem with IRIS, the graphical interface doesn't really give you a practical idea of what a sound will actually sound like.

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I rather automate whatever EQ instead of using this new Iris.

 

Fiddled around with that Iris VSTi - this tool makes no sense, because it is limited to the few things it is capable of, for example the filters can not be synchronized with tempo.

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I rather automate whatever EQ instead of using this new Iris.


Fiddled around with that Iris VSTi - this tool makes no sense, because it is limited to the few things it is capable of, for example the filters can not be synchronized with tempo.

 

 

It also does not appear that one can apply the LFO to Filter Cutoff... something I would've thought was "basic".

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Back in the mid 90's Steve Berkley (founder of Peak software) developed a program called QuickMQ. It worked in conjunction with a program called Lemur, that did spectral analysis and sinusoidal resynthesis. You could select different frequency ranges like on IRIS, but without all the tools for selection that IRIS has. What Quick MQ did have was exactly what I would like to see in a program like IRIS: convolution, deconvolution, spectrum mix, granular desynthesis, brightening, harmonic rotation, and others. There were two main limitations with QuickMQ-it wasn't real-time and it wasn't stable. When I first read about IRIS, I thought this would be a great new spectral tool. After further examination, while it has it's uses, I'd like to see more. How about FM from one spectral region of a sample to another? Or convolution?

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