Recording - March 2013 - 60

iZotope Alloy 2
Easier navigation and upgraded sound improve
by John Rossi III
an already great plug-in

We last looked at iZotope’s Alloy in our September 2010 issue.
We concluded at the time that Alloy was a channel strip that sounded
fantastic, was easy to use, was very light on CPU resources, and that
could complement any DAW. After the passage of a couple of years,
iZotope has released Alloy’s successor, Alloy 2. Does the upgrade
really improve on the awesomeness of iZotope’s initial release?
Continuing in iZotope’s no-nonsense tradition, the installation of Alloy
2 is straightforward, done either via online or offline challenge/response
or as authorization to an iLok USB Key. Like most other iZotope products,
Alloy 2 installs as an independent program, meaning that it cohabits
peacefully with Alloy, allowing either to be added to any given track.
After playing with Alloy 2 for a while, I found that sometimes a preset that
I developed in the original Alloy was just what I needed, and because
the programs are sufficiently different, the old Alloy preset was more convenient to use than trying to replicate it in Alloy 2. Users of Alloy will find
this to be a very useful feature for ‘signature’ presets they’ve developed.
User interface
The UI for Alloy 2 represents a significant improvement. The module
screen has been given more real estate, and the cosmetic appearance
and the ergonomic locations of the controls and meters have been
improved considerably. The old Macro Screen function has been
replaced with an easier-to-use and more logically laid out Overview
Screen; it shows the activity of each of Alloy 2’s modules that are part of
a preset, and enables access to the modules via the most used controls.
The Overview Panel screenshot shows a factory preset for the simulation of a miked speaker cabinet in which all modules except the De-Esser
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are used. For any combination of modules, the upper third of
the workspace is always dedicated to the eq spectrum display,
and the remaining modules, their controls and displays share
the bottom of the workspace as vertically aligned panels.
Although the individual module screens allow finer detail editing, for about 80% of applications the controls available in the

Overview Screen will be sufficient for tweaking, especially in
the case of making small adjustments to factory presets. And
speaking of which...
Factory presets
Alloy 2 ships with about 200 Global presets, i.e., presets that use multiple modules. Playing around with them
for several hours revealed that they encompass a lot of territory, and I had no trouble finding presets that came close
to what I needed for anything I wanted to do. The audio
engineers at iZotope understand musicality, and the provided presets are very usable and provide an excellent
stepping-off point for crafting user-created presets.
iZotope also provides presets for single modules, but these
are much less numerous. For my work, while allowing that
module presets is a nice feature, I found that I never actually
needed to use them, nor did I feel a need to create them. In
practical use, if I wanted to put a single dynamics processor
on a track, I would probably use a specialized plug-in for the
job. Also, the whole point of Alloy 2 is precision-crafting of
the tone of a track, and most often this will involve using multiple modules.
Changes from Alloy
The complement of modules in Alloy 2 is the same as for
Alloy, except that Alloy 2’s two independent dynamics
modules (routable in series or parallel) now have separate

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