Over the Christmas period, each team member is sharing their product of the year. For Mike Thornton, it is RX6 Advanced from iZotope. Its the first time 'Mr RX It' has awarded iZotope RX Editors Choice. Watch the review and read the article to find out why...

Back in April this year iZotope released RX6 Standard and RX6 Advanced and also added a new product, RX Elements which replaced the RX Plugin Pack and includes the RX 6 Standalone Editor application as well as the plug-ins that were in the RX Plugin Pack. New modules in RX6 include De-rustle, De-wind, Dialogue Isolate, and De-bleed.

Machine Learning

iZotope have been able to bring the latest machine learning technologies to bear on some of the previously impossible audio repair problems including mic rustle, wind noise, and lifting dialogue out of noisy backgrounds. Gerry Caron, Chief Product Officer of iZotope explains....

RX 6 pushes the envelope of what is possible in audio repair, while introducing tools that fit the needs of everyone, from the home studio artist to post production professionals. Machine learning is enabling advancements across industries, including audio tech. With RX 6, we are utilising this technology to address some of the audio industry’s deepest pain points, providing uncompromising quality and dependability to create truly great sound.

What Is New In RX6?

RX6 Advanced

• De-rustle Module - This has been designed to remove distracting lavalier microphone rustle and other rustling sounds from your dialogue.

• De-wind Module - iZotope have designed this module to reduce or remove intermittent low-end wind rumble that occurs when wind effects a microphone especially when recording outside.

• Dialogue Isolate - This module extracts dialogue from noisy backgrounds whether this is a busy street, a sports event or a trade show floor.

• Plus everything new in RX6 Standard.

RX6 Standard

iZotope has worked hard to make RX6 even more useful in music applications and so have added some new modules to the RX6 Standard version rather than just to the Advanced version to make these features affordable to more users. 

• De-bleed Module - Now you can remove bleed and spill from headphones that mics can pick up. As long as you have an audio file of the source of the spill then with the De-bleed module, you can get rid of that annoying spill from the click track for example.

• De-ess Module and Plug-in - iZotope have combined their spectral repair and conventional dynamics de-essing technologies to produce a brand new module for RX6.  This now gives you 2 ways to deal with sibilance either based on the RX spectral repair tool or the conventional frequency based dynamics processing, in the new De-ess module and plug-in.

• Mouth De-click Module and Plug-in - iZotope have taken their De-click technology, refined it and produced a new dedicated Mouth De-click module focusing on removing mouth clicks in vocals and dialogue.

• Breath Control Module - iZotope have brought their breath reduction technology into RX6 to produce a new module to remove or reduce distracting breaths between words and phrases in either vocals or dialogue. It will also have a place on any track where the musician has to breath, so you can use it on woodwind tracks to reduce the player’s breaths.

• MP3 Export - You can now export and batch process MP3 audio files directly from RX6 and RX6 Advanced.

• De-plosive which was only in RX5 Advanced is now included in RX6 Standard and has also been improved. In addition, this is now available as a plug-in so you don’t need to leave Pro tools to happen your plosive problems.

Composite View

iZotope have added a new feature - Composite View to both RX6 Standard and RX6 Advanced. This new feature allows you to import up to 16 individual tracks and work on them in RX6 as if they were one file enabling you to address any common issues across all the files. This could be multi-channel or multiple clips from the same source. This will really help workflows in audio post-production where you have a number of files all with the same issues as you can set up the processing and then apply it to up to 16 different clips in one go.

Module Menu

The Module menu has undergone an overhaul in RX6 with clearer sections headed Repair, Utility, and Measurements with some new icons and module names and in the Utility section a number of the elements have been brought out of tabs in modules and now are accessible directly from the module menu. The new Measurement section brings all the measurement based tools into one place. I especially appreciate that the Spectrum Analyser is now back in the Module list whereas in RX5 along with Markers & Regions and Waveform Statistics you had to go up to the Window menu to access them.

Filter The Module List

With all the new module and the unbundling of some of the utility modules, iZotope have recognised that not all of us want to see all the modules in the Module menu and each of us might like to have a different combination of modules on show normally so in RX6 they have added a Filter option to the Module Menu list so you can either use some of the included presets or create your own filters so you can customise the Module list to suit you and the work you are doing.

RX Elements

This new product aimed for users on a budget who want the additional power and features in the standalone version of iZotope RX but cannot afford RX6 Standard can now take advantage of this new product. It is the same price as the RX Plugin Pack but includes the RX standalone editor application with the following modules…

• Batch Processor

• Clip Gain

• De-click

• De-clip

• De-hum

• Fade

• Find Similar

• Gain

• Markers & Regions

• Mixing module

• Module Chain

• Module List Filters

• Normalize

• Phase

• Third party plug-in hosting

• Recording & Monitoring

• Signal Generator

• Spectrum Analyzer

• Voice De-noise

• Waveform Statistics

RX Elements, RX6 Standard and RX6 Advanced Features Comparison

iZotope RX6 Pricing

• RX Elements - $129

• RX6 Standard - $399

• RX6 Advanced - $1199

• PX Post Production Suite 2 - 1499

  • This bundle includes the following...

  • RX6 Advanced

  • Neutron Advanced

  • RX Loudness Control

  • Insight Metering Suite

  • Exclusive content and tutorials worth $250

RX Elements, RX6 Standard, RX6 Advanced Upgrade Pricing

Owners of previous versions of RX and Post Production Suite 2 can find their upgrade coupons in their iZotope accounts. 

iZotope RX6 System Requirements

• Supported operating systems

  • Windows: 7, 8, and 10

  • Mac: OS X 10.8.5 - 10.12

• Supported plug-in hosts

  • Pro Tools 10-12, Audition CC 2017, Cubase 9, Final Cut Pro 10, Live 9, Logic Pro X (Supported in OS X 10.11 or higher), Media Composer 8.8, Nuendo 7, Premiere Pro CC 2017, Studio One 3

• Supported plug-in formats

  • AAX (64-bit), Audiosuite DPM, Audio Unit (32-bit and 64-bit), RTAS (32-bit), VST 2 (32-bit and 64-bit), and VST 3 (32-bit and 64-bit).

What Do I Think About RX6

I haven’t had that long to get to grips with RX6 but I have to say it is a huge release. They have added so many new features, some of which I have covered in my video review. Working mainly in audio post production, for me the De-rustle, De-wind and Dialogue Isolate are incredible. I had to clean up a video of a baptism on a beach that was originally recorded on a VHS camcorder and then transferred onto DVD with the low frequencies filtered off but there was still some higher frequency wind noise left. I thought that De-wind wouldn’t be able to fix it, but it did! The dialogue was also embedded in a lot of background noise and instead of de-noising it, I just ran it through Dialogue Isolate, job done!

Moving onto the music based tools, it's great to see iZotope adding some more music focused tools to RX6 and adding them straight into RX6 Standard too. The De-bleed module has to be the stand-out module here, I have had to deal with click bleed in the past especially with larger orchestral recordings and it was hard work. De-bleed does it straight away. It

My only disappointment with the RX6 release is we still do not have multi-channel support. With the advent of VR and ambisonic acquisition using the likes of the Sennheiser Ambeo mic we really need multichannel support even more than ever, because we have more and more content being acquired in multichannel formats now. I just hope that we don’t have to wait until RX7 to finally get multichannel support.

Even so, the new features in both RX6 Standard and RX6 Advanced are amazing and the addition of RX Elements for the same price as the RX Plugin Pack was is also a very smart move and so I am awarding iZotope's RX6 Editors Choice.