Recording - September 2010 - 50

BY JOHN ROSSI III

iZotope

Alloy
Ozone power for
I confess! I am guilty of using iZotope Ozone mastering effects—on tracks! Yes, despite the CPU load, some of us mixers continue to use Ozone on tracks and subbuses anyway. With some Ozone effects that actually works somewhat easily, but others are way out of place in a on-track mixing environment. To remedy this situation iZotope gave us Alloy. In short, Alloy is to tracks and mixing as Ozone is to the final master. While at first glance Alloy contains elements that are the rudiments of any channel strip on any mixer surface, it offers so much tweakability that a single display of every control would be unusuable. So Alloy’s processing functions are broken into six modules—EQ, Exciter, Transient, Dynamics, De-Esser, and Limiter. Each module has its own function-appropriate layout, with its screen selected by clicking one of the six function buttons at the bottom of the Alloy main pane. The Equalizer As an example, Figure 1 shows Alloy’s eq module. The black inner screen shows the configuration of the equalizer. The position of each of the eight radio buttons denotes the frequency and amplitude offset of the eq band to which it assigned. The brackets surrounding the button can be click-dragged to set the Q of the band. Clicking on a band button causes the filter function of that band to be shown independently from the other bands in terms of overall equalizer response. For the example screen, that response is shown by the mustard-colored response curve. While typical equalizers feature dedicated shelving filters for the lowest and highest bands with adjustable parametric filters for the inner bands, any
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tracking and mixing

Figure 1: Alloy’s eq module band of Alloy’s eq can be set to any of It’s Exciting! seven shapes—Bell, Lo-Shelf, High-Shelf, Alloy’s Exciter module can be configLP, Sharp-LP, HP and Sharp-HP—selected ured as either a single-band exciter or a 3by right-clicking on the button on a PC or band multiband exciter. Alloy features control-clicking on a Mac. This allows for iZotope’s Harmonic Scaling Technology exceptionally fine-tuned eq response. which allows emulation of harmonic disIn addition to the eq curve, Alloy also tortion produced by tubes, tape and transhows the spectrum of the audio wave- sistors as well as warm or bright emphasis. form as either a real-time or averaged disLike most Alloy modules, the Exciter modplay—the gray waveform in the example ule contains a frequency analyzer. In the screen. The ability to average the spec- Exciter, this display shows the added hartrum to infinity provides a unique way to monic content as red harmonics drawn detect audio artifacts such as periodic among the gray harmonics of the input noises or resonances. audio. Harmonic colorization is controlled

Figure 2: Alloy’s Transient module

Recording - September 2010

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