Radio production suites are environments that foster creativity. They are the places where the audible image of the station or network is born, and where advertisements come to life. The production engineer is faced with the daily task of keeping creative material current and relevant to listeners and advertisers. Often however, the daily doldrums of production are relegated to using beds and effects from the trusty elements library. What happens when the flash and flare of the elements library dries up? What happens when a client or general manager wants original, cutting-edge audio? Developers at iZotope have the solution. Iris is a groundbreaking plug-in or standalone program for PC and Mac. It is built on iZotope's spectral selection technology. Users can effectively "draw" frequency-specific nuances on an audio sample, and it is essentially amazing.

Draw your sound?

Using a visual drawing engine, Iris is a sampler and resynthesizer that allows the user to import audio samples and patches from a 4GB iZotope library, or import his or her own WAV or AIFF files. In doing so, the sample is displayed in waveform view, spectrogram view, or both. Most NLE software provides a spectral view, so Iris' spectrogram is not terribly foreign as it behaves much the same way. Familiar tools such as lassos, magic wands, erasers, paint brushes and select boxes facilitate free-hand manipulation of frequency, amplitude and time within the workspace. The sound created by a paint brush visually highlighting frequencies anywhere from 20Hz to 20kHz is fascinating. Then, imagine using the brush to additionally paint over and highlight more frequencies at any point on the sample. Or, add to the fun by using the frequency selection box to select a horizontal group of frequencies. The possibilities are endless at this point for augmenting the sound of an audio sample or sound effect, and we haven't even discussed the mix view.

Mix it all up

As previously mentioned, Iris provides radical control of frequency-specific sound design using the spectrogram and iZotope's spectral selection technology. In the event that a sound designer needed to recreate a drone or pad, add a new twist to a transition effect or apply an amazing sweep to a voiceover sample, the visual drawing engine makes it happen. However, Iris is designed to stack three samples and a sub waveform into one patch. The control of the four mixed samples playing simultaneously is in mix view. Three different samples can be played at once with endless differing effects. The sub waveform is a sample that stays relatively constant by way of pulling the entire patch together. A low-frequency saw tooth waveform, as an example, may be put in the sub sample to keep things flowing. With that idea in mind, any sample can be fine-tuned to match the pitch and tempo of other samples. If your sub waveform plays out in the key of B-flat, the other samples can be tuned to match, as it were. iZotope's Radius RT is a real-time pitch shifter that transparently preserves timing while accurately changing pitches.

Samples 1, 2, 3 and sub each have their own mixer-like layout in mix view. An entire manual would be needed to detail this view. However, each sample contains features such as pitch control, gain, pan and an amp envelope. This is where Iris lends itself to synthesizer-type control of each sample within the patch. Parameters including attack, decay, sustain and release are controls in amp envelope. Send effects route each sample to the distortion, chorus, delay and reverb channels. These effects each have multiple parameters for critical crafting and artistic design of the sound of each sample.

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