iZotope Neutron 5

Neutron 5’s Mix Assistant can help you quickly find suitable processing options for individual instrument tracks within your mix.

Can the improved, AI‑based Mix Assistant make iZotope’s already powerful collection of mixing plug‑ins more useful?

iZotope now offer several plug‑in ‘suites’, including the Ozone mastering suite and Nectar, which focuses on vocal production. The third is Neutron, which comprises a range of tools aimed at general mixing duties. In the recent iterations of all three suites, iZotope have introduced AI‑based ‘assistant’ features, which have the potential to help both those who are still learning the crafts of mixing and mastering, and those with more experience who perhaps need to be able to work more quickly. As well as allowing their individual processing modules to be loaded directly in your DAW, all three products offer a ‘mothership’ plug‑in that provides access to them all in one place. Ozone and Nectar were updated fairly recently (they were reviewed in SOS January 2024 and April 2024, respectively), and now it’s the turn of Neutron, which has been updated to version 5.

New ’Tron

Neutron 5 is available as the full version, or a streamlined Neutron Elements. The latter provides less experienced music producers/mixers with access to Neutron’s key processing elements, through the AI‑assisted Mix Assistant and a compact macro‑style control set. Inserted on a suitable track or bus, the Mix Assistant will audition the audio before offering processing suggestions that, hopefully, can improve the sound. The Mix Assistant is also available in the full version of Neutron, but here the user can choose to switch to a Detailed View, and dig much deeper into the control set of Neutron’s individual processing modules. The full version also includes a Visual Mixer plug‑in, designed to help with creating an initial static level balance of your various tracks (or buses). And, as with the top‑of‑the‑line versions of Ozone and Nectar, its component processors are also supplied as individual plug‑ins that can be used outside the mothership plug‑in.

With the AI genie now very much out of the bottle, it’s no surprise to see that the Mix Assistant features have been improved. From the user perspective, the most obvious demonstration of this is the revamping of the macro control set, which is now split across four panels called Tone, Dynamics, Saturation and Width. In their documentation, iZotope refer to these as Intent Controls, which is a good description: both the panel labels and the controls themselves now make their effect, if not the processes behind them, much clearer for the novice user.

Neutron 5’s module selection includes three new options — Phase, Clipper and Density – and as shown here, all three can also be used as individual plug‑ins.

Once you move beyond the Mix Assistant’s Assistant View in the full version, the Detailed View includes three new modules: Clipper, Density and Phase. The previous line‑up remains, so you also have Equalizer, Compressor, Gate, Exciter, Transient Shaper, Sculptor (a ‘smart’ dynamic EQ to improve the tonal balance of instruments) and Unmask (to reduce unwanted frequency‑based competition between specific instruments). Taken as a whole, this suite provides plenty of options for a whole range of mix‑related processing tasks, but note that I said ‘processing’ — you won’t find effects such as reverb or delay here. As before, the Neutron 5 package also includes the very useful Tonal Balance Control 2 plug‑in.

Clipper’s purpose should be obvious from the name, and it’s a useful addition to Neutron’s complement of dynamics processors. Density is particularly interesting: it uses upwards compression to raise lower‑level parts of your audio signal, making it easy to prevent such elements disappearing in a busy mix. Finally, Phase attempts to fix any phase issues you might have within your audio, whether that’s asymmetrical waveforms on an individual track, or time‑based issues across multiple tracks, such as you might experience with multi‑mic drum recordings. Essentially, it automates what can be a complex task, and then lets you make manual adjustments if you feel some fine‑tuning is required.

All modules now offer a very useful ‘delta’ option — the delta signal is the difference between the dry and processed sound, so you can use this to hear exactly what a module’s current settings are adding or taking away. Finally, as in the latest version of Ozone, a number of Neutron’s modules offer both Mid‑Sides and transient‑sustain modes of operation alongside the normal...