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Izotope Neutron mixing plugin


Mornats
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https://www.izotope.com/en/products/mix/neutron.html#&panel2-1

Just ordered this with a nice crossgrade discount - £74 from Time+Space. The peeps over at VI Conrol seem to like it http://vi-control.net/community/threads/izotope-neutron.56352/. I'll let you know how I get on over the weekend! I'm liking how it can analyse your tracks and suggest frequencies that are competing between say, strings and synths. You can then edit the EQ for both tracks in the same interface.

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Yes. Will be getting that during the day with the crossgrade discount.
I tend to get most of my stuff from JRR.
https://www.jrrshop.com

Usually an extra 10% off, as well as their discount prices.
You just get the license and download from the vendor site.

I get most of my VSL stuff from them, because VSL charge Euros.
Even if there is a deal on at VSL with discount for their existing customers, JRR always match + the 10% (great company and in $ of course)

Looks like around £73/74.00 from them as well, even at the worst currency rate (no VAT with them either, although I always pay through Paypal).
https://www.jrrshop.com/checkout/cart/

EDIT: Time & Space have always done good deals, yet I always seem to forget about them. :)

Edited by lowdown
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Here's something interesting to consider. The only Izotope product that I own that qualified me for the £74 crossgrade was Nectar Elements. This is currently on sale over at PluginBoutique for £26.95 - http://www.pluginboutique.com/product/2-Effects/54-Vocal-Processing/752-Nectar-Elements. So you can get this, then Neutron for just over a hundred quid. Nice!

I've just gone through an old track of mine, stripped off the EQ and compression on every track, slapped Neutron on them all and hit the track assist on each one. Overall, there's a lot more clarity and definition in the sounds. That's without tweaking anything (or even knowing what I'm doing yet!). With some further input into it I'd say you could get some very good results from this. I plan to do an A/B test of it sometime soon.

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I just tried on my last composition challenge piece That Place. So, this has 27 tracks, of which I put Neutron on 17 of them. Normal playback before I used Neutron had my CPU peaking at 70% usage (a 4ghz i7 4790k) with RAM usage around 11GB. After I put Neutron on, CPU peaked at 107% and RAM was pushing 14GB (out of 16GB). Playback really wasn't working! To be fair, 17 instances of it is a bit much and there's a fair bit going on in that track anyway. 16 or so tracks of Neutron is taking around 20 - 25% CPU usage. I'm kinda pushing my rig a bit with this track in the first place. In reality, I don't think it was designed to be thrown on this many tracks and if you're doing arrangements like this you're probably using a slave PC or two anyway.

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[quote name='Mornats' timestamp='1475861420' post='3149369']
I just tried on my last composition challenge piece That Place. So, this has 27 tracks, of which I put Neutron on 17 of them. Normal playback before I used Neutron had my CPU peaking at 70% usage (a 4ghz i7 4790k) with RAM usage around 11GB. After I put Neutron on, CPU peaked at 107% and RAM was pushing 14GB (out of 16GB). Playback really wasn't working! To be fair, 17 instances of it is a bit much and there's a fair bit going on in that track anyway. 16 or so tracks of Neutron is taking around 20 - 25% CPU usage. I'm kinda pushing my rig a bit with this track in the first place. In reality, I don't think it was designed to be thrown on this many tracks and if you're doing arrangements like this you're probably using a slave PC or two anyway.
[/quote]

I use Vienna VE6 pro. On just the one machine (can be used on multi machines even networking Mac and PC together).
This hosts everything outside of your DAW, inc samples and Soft Instruments. Works a treat and does really free up CPU resources.

I will be giving Neutron(s) a good run out tomorrow on an Orchestral project. It will be interesting how it
pans out in that context. Been keeping an eye out over at VI Control, seeing if anyone has used it in that situation yet?
Early days there.
http://vi-control.net/community/threads/izotope-neutron.56352/page-4#post-3999665

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Well, I bounced down Maschine, Action Strings and Miroslav in Reaper and got a chunk of CPU back.

So, I did a comparison for you. Here's a 1 min piece of That Place where all the orchestral and choir stuff is going on. I've got Neutron on all the percussion (Maschine and Damage), the orchestra (Miroslav, Action Strings, Solo Strings and one or two more) and the choirs (Storm Choir, Olympus Elements and some Evolve stuff). All I did was use the track assist on each of the tracks and left it at that. The percussion loses some volume and therefore a bit of impact but I could fix that manually.

Here's the before: https://www.dropbox.com/s/2gfe6vlbvpcu086/that%20place%20selection.wav?dl=0

Here's the after: https://www.dropbox.com/s/0ldof7jrhqvkviv/that%20place%20neutron%20selection.wav?dl=0

I've also been on that thread on VI Control. Most people seem pretty happy with it so far. I am certainly.

Whatcha think of the out-of-the-box track assist based on these clips?

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[quote name='Mornats' timestamp='1475859469' post='3149343']
Here's something interesting to consider. The only Izotope product that I own that qualified me for the £74 crossgrade was Nectar Elements. This is currently on sale over at PluginBoutique for £26.95 - [url="http://www.pluginboutique.com/product/2-Effects/54-Vocal-Processing/752-Nectar-Elements."]http://www.pluginbou...ectar-Elements.[/url] So you can get this, then Neutron for just over a hundred quid. Nice![/quote]

Damn you Paul and your GAS-inducing good advice! :D

I've been playing with the Neutron demo today - love it - and have now splurged on Nectar Elements and Neutron after reading your tip above. Cheers mate. Saved me around £50 and I have an extra plug-in to boot.

Currently waiting for Support at Plugin Boutique to reply with the serial number... [i]*fingers drumming on keyboard*[/i]

What I really like about Neutron is how it sort of tackles the old analogue trick of tweaking two EQ dials at once to find the 'sweet spot' between two competing instruments/channels. Very neat. Seems to work best when the EQ is used quite subtley, but I've only just started playing with it. The compressor, exciter and other features seem good too. Means I'm having to reWire from Reason into Ableton, but that's easy peasy.

All good! :)

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Had a good play with Neutron over the weekend. Immediate impressions:

[b]Pros...[/b][list]
[*]Very easy and intuitive to use! I had it mostly figured out within in 10 minutes, without referring to any tutorials (and I'm someone who likes tutorials). Nice interface with everything within reach.
[/list][list]
[*]Track Assistant works well - very consistent - and gives useful/workable starting points for EQ'ing each channel.
[/list][list]
[*]Love the simplicity of the 'Masking' linked EQ feature: probably my favourite feature of the plug-in overall. I'll be using that a lot.
[/list][list]
[*]The build-in Compressor, Exciter and Transient Shaper all seem very clean and usable.
[/list]

[b]Cons...[/b][list]
[*]Very tempting to let pre-sets taking over the 'thinking' when using a plug-in of this type. The Track Assistant is a great starting point, but in the majority of cases I found it does need [i]some[/i] adjustment to make sure it's actually improving the mix. I tried it on a bass-heavy track and the result would have been very weak and 'thin' sounding had I relied solely on the pre-sets... so it definitely needs tweaking to taste.
[/list][list]
[*]It's not so good on the master bus: this is where the pre-sets have most potential to really destroy a good mix! Plenty of potential to adjust it to taste, of course... but I have other, better plug-ins and workflow for doing that. That said, if you're using this as your 'go to' mixing tool then it's certainly a lot better than most DAW in-build tools for master bus duties. Just don't let the pre-sets do all the heavy lifting and again, tweak to taste.
[/list]

Overall: money well spent! Very happy with it :)

[i]And cheers to Mornats for the heads up...![/i]

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Glad you're happy with it!

Check out this post on VI Control from jcrosby http://vi-control.net/community/threads/izotope-neutron.56352/page-5#post-4000311

He gives a good overview but the key thing is that the track analyser suggests a starting point (as do the presets) and you tweak from there. I think I've tweaked most things when I've used it but it's set me off on the right track. And that's exactly what this type of plugin should do. The masking feature helped me fit a violin and female choir around each other really well by using the inverse link. When I tried the same with that violin and a male choir the inverse link took out the bulk of the choir sound when I lowered the eq on the choir or it took out the nice sounding timbre of the violin if I went the other way. So on that one I left it. So yeah, it's a guide and a starting point but a good one at that.

I've had a little more success on the master bus but that could be due to my mangling of the master bus using T-racks initially :D There's a lot of master bus presets that slam the bass and treble too much but one of them is quite subtle (basic mix maybe?) and a good starting point for tweaking.

That VI Control post is worth reading by the way, especially the last few pages as people weigh in with their experience of it. Most people are very happy with it.

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[quote name='blueburstbass93' timestamp='1476210008' post='3152398']
So the discount works even if you've only just bought an izotope plugin? Is it 50% off?
[/quote]

Yup. I bought the Nectar Elements plug in discounted to around £25. This qualified me for a big discount on Neutron (down to about £73).

I made the purchases through http://www.pluginboutique.com

Had to email Supprt with evidence of my Nectar purchase (serial and order numbers). They then activated Neutron on my account for downloading. Took about 12 hours for them to reply, but it was a weekend.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I think you'd have to order Nectar Elements first, get the serial registered with Izotope then buy Neutron. You have to email your Nectar serial to the place you buy it from. If you buy it direct from Izotope though then you'll see the upgrade option when you log in. Either way, you'll have to get Nectar first. I'm not sure how long you have to wait between buying one then the other. I'd have though that with Izotope, it would show right away as soon as you register Nectar. If you buy from Time+Space or somewhere else they'll need to do a manual check with Izotope so you'd have a bit of time to get it registered.

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[quote name='Mornats' timestamp='1477174173' post='3160404']
I think you'd have to order Nectar Elements first, get the serial registered with Izotope then buy Neutron. You have to email your Nectar serial to the place you buy it from. If you buy it direct from Izotope though then you'll see the upgrade option when you log in. Either way, you'll have to get Nectar first. I'm not sure how long you have to wait between buying one then the other. I'd have though that with Izotope, it would show right away as soon as you register Nectar. If you buy from Time+Space or somewhere else they'll need to do a manual check with Izotope so you'd have a bit of time to get it registered.
[/quote]

Thank you.

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