Recording - January 2016 - 58

Soundware Showcase
iZotope Iris 2
by Mike Metlay

iZotope is well known for its wide variety of software
tools; the firm and its proven technologies appear
everywhere in the music creation process, from creation and tracking to mixing, mastering, and
archival/repair. Look for reviews of the Ozone 7
Advanced mastering toolkit and RX 5 Advanced audio
rescue package, coming up in future issues.
Today, we're playing with a product that's unlike
anything else the firm sells... and in some ways, unlike
anything else out there on the market: iZotope's one
and only full-fledged virtual synthesizer, Iris 2.
Iris 2 (as opposed to Iris 1)
The original Iris has been around for several years,
but the new version is so different from its predecessor
and presents such a radically changed user interface
and feature set that it's considered a completely new
program. In fact, if you upgrade to Iris 2 from the previous version, it will leave the original intact on your computer with all of its libraries and presets kept separate,
just so you can step back if you wish.
For those of us who have never used Iris before,
though, Iris 2 is a revelation in sound design, as lovelysounding as it is cool to work with, as deep and
nuanced as it is fun and intuitive. If you love messing

RECORDING January 2016

around with sound design and creating beautiful, playable electronica, Iris
2 will give you the shivers.
Iris 2 is a sample-playback virtual instrument that can load up to four sound
sources at a time, either samples or single-cycle oscillator waveforms; the latter
are also sampled, but are kept in a
separate folder hierarchy for ease of
use. Once the appropriate samples
have been loaded into Iris 2, they can
be looped, truncated non-destructively,
and edited with a wide variety of spectral tools that are the real heart of Iris
2. The program comes with a massive
11 GB of samples to play with... everything from synthesizer tones and real
instruments to animal cries, environments and ambiences, mechanical clatter, and even the sounds of food being
played with-a shaken coconut makes
a dandy rhythm instrument, as it turns
out!
The four samples are run through a
multimode filter and can be processed
by four effects-distortion, chorus,
delay, and reverb-either with individual sends per sample or globally at the
mix level. There are a fair number of
modulation options, easily assigned to
most parameters; this easy and quick modulation is the other key to why Iris 2
is so powerful yet so much fun to program.
A walking tour of the interface
The interface of Iris 2 isn't resizable for larger or smaller monitors, but
its various pieces can be collapsed out of the way to make more room for
others, or completely undocked into separate windows if you're working
with multiple monitors and have the real estate to have many windows
open at once. The interface is neatly organized, and even when everything is in the same window it's easy to find your way around.
Along the top is the Global Panel, which has controls for patch selection and
browsing (popping open a browser window as needed), prominent Undo and
Redo buttons, settings for mono/legato/polyphonic play, controls for Glide
(portamento), Intensity (compression and limiting for more loudness, iZotope
style), and Output level, and individual level and display selection controls for
each sample along with Solo and Mute buttons. The All button stacks all four
samples in the Spectrogram Area, and the Mix button pops open a separate
Mixer window for quick access to all four samples' levels and effects.
Below the Spectrogram Area, which we'll get to in a bit, are the
Modulation and Keyboard Panels. The Modulation Panel displays information about the various modulation sources and Macros (which we'll also
get to in a bit). Pitch and Modulation MIDI input are shown on vertical displays, and up and down bends can be set to different ranges; there's also
a Map button to open a Keymap window for splits and crossfades.
On the right are the Sample and Master Panels. The Sample Panel
shows one of the four samples in the patch at a time, with controls for
sample selection/browsing, playback direction, and pitch shifting mode
(with or without affecting timing, the latter being much more CPU intensive). There are knobs for coarse and fine tuning, pan position, and
sample gain (level). Below that are the Send Effects; note that if your
patch uses Master Effects, these will be greyed out.
The Master Panel has controls for overall panning, gain, velocity sensitivity, and a realtime spectral display showing the harmonic content of the
output waveform, low frequencies to high. Beneath that is the Master Filter,
with mode selection, keyboard tracking, and controls for cutoff and resonance. The Master Effects are below that, with a selector button for Master
or Send effects routing. If you're using Send Effects in a patch, this section
will be greyed out.

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - January 2016