AES 2009: Izotope Alloy (Video)

In general, mastering software and hardware doesn’t come cheap, but Izotope successfully bucked the trend with their inexpensive Ozone 4 mastering plug-in, which received a mountain of praise in SOS July 2009. Although Ozone 4 is designed exclusively for the mastering stage, where plug-ins that require a high CPU load and introduce latency are commonplace, Izotope were surprised to find that many of their customers were using Ozone’s extensive sound-shaping tools for mixing. In order to furnish these users with a more suitable product, Izotope designed Alloy, which condenses an EQ, exciter, transient designer, dynamics controller, de-esser and limiter into one zero-latency plug-in.

As well as providing the user with a similar sound quality to Ozone, Alloy introduces a new function called Macro Fader, which allows a single fader to control a number of parameters from many different modules. Both practical and creative uses come to mind here: how about a control labelled ‘Brightness’ which adjusts high-frequency harmonics and raises a high-band compressor threshold? Macro Faders let you create your own controls just like this, or pick from 150 presets. Full side-chaining support is augmented by Izotope’s proprietary Crosschaining feature, which enables the dynamic content of a frequency band to trigger the compression of another. Izotope Alloy costs $249 to download from the Izotope web site, with discount price of $129 available for Ozone users. Hugh managed to get a demo of Alloy at AES:

www.izotope.com