The recordings I work with are simple 2 channel stereo concert recordings from either AT933 cards or hyper caps or audio reality binaurals.
Until recently, I’ve been using Audition 3.0
A few months ago I bought Izotope RX 7 standard as an adjunct. I’m still a neophyte as far as using all the capabilities of both Audition and Izotope – but – here’s what I’m finding about RX 7.
The promo videos constantly highlight music rebalance and music repair assistant features.
Honestly, for the type of recordings I have, these haven’t been as helpful as of yet.
What I HAVE found helpful are:
Clip Gain – although available pretty closely in Audacity, it’s been very easy to use to boost artist banter in between songs.
De –Click – probably the most outrageous module I’ve ever used to eliminate or drastically reduce clapping from people sitting close by. Select output clicks only and slide the choices up and down til you only hear the claps. Deselect output clicks only and render and the claps are almost totally gone or diminished so much that if you listen in headphones, they no longer bother you.
De Reverb – A subtle touch is required here, but for my recordings that had a bit of echo off the walls of the venue, this has helped to bring the audio of the instruments and vocals a bit more up front.
Spectral Repair – I’ve been learning to rely on the spectrogram views. For me, this is proving to be extremely helpful to reduce or eliminate those loud whistles that some audience folks insist on doing at various times. While both Audition and Audacity give good spectrogram views, RX 7 allows you to vary colors and level views so you can really see and highlight the offending noises. Then you can attenuate or replace from adjacent area. For me – great because I like to listen back to my recordings in headphones.
Spectral De Noise – I’ve only used this once so far. In one of my concert recordings, the artist wandered off stage and played his electric guitar off amp and sang without any amplification. The recording was extremely quiet and had hiss in the background. I was able to highlight the small bit of hiss/silence and get rid of it without (to me) any noticeable change in the audio I wanted to hear.
OK – so that’s what I’ve found really helpful in RX 7 standard.
On the negative side, the Equalizer leaves a lot to be desired. You get to use the EQ with some really nice features but to see your waveform, you need to open a separate window.
In RX 7 standard, there are no compressors or limiters included. RX 7 installs in both 32 and 64 bit. I’ve been choosing to use the 64 bit version. In 32 bit, I could include all the Audition VST plugins but they are all 32 bit. So instead, I installed the Tokyo Rose Koltenikov 64 bit compressor as well as the Loud Max 64 bit limiter.
That leaves the poor EQ choice.
I ended up buying the Ozone 8 elements plugin. This allowed me to see changes in the waveform in the same window as the equalizer. In addition, you can control very easily the audio you balance and hear in both channels equally. I can’t explain this easily – watch a video or download a demo to see what I’m talking about.
All this being said – I’m finding that I can both screw up or improve my recordings based on how much fiddling I do.
Again, keep in mind this review is what I’ve found helpful for 2 channel concert recordings that I’m trying to enhance or fix. There are other features that apply to multi-channel recordings that don’t apply to my usage.