iZotope RX is not the only game in town (Alternatives list)

[noiseboyuk]

I would like this though: 'Complex Ambience Match'. But not for the price of advanced.

Good news - it doesn't work. So you've saved yourself a fortune.

That's a recurring theme in many of the newer features by the way. Things either don't work properly or don't do useful tasks. The headline "multiple speaker detection" promises wonderful things, separating several speakers on to their own layers. In fact it just translates them badly to text, much worse than Microsoft, and that information can't be usefully used anyway. If you were searching for other instances of the word "disappointing", it would be great to highlight the word and cycle through the alts in the file and then replace. You can't do any of that.

[equisonus]

Many of my plug-ins require an active internet connection or at least very frequent "check-ins" and it's not a huge problem to me fortunately, albeit annoying.

There are definitely not that many audio plugins that act like a policeman, asking you to authorize your access every 5 runs. Unfortunately, for many people it is a problem, a huge one, so they should know about this detail instead of asking for payment charge back later. Even the developer wants users to know it when they click on the Buy button.

What I was referring to is not DeepRemix though, but DeepAudio which is basically the full version of DeepRemix.

I’m afraid it’s not. DeepRemix is the tool by Hit’n’mix for stem separation and it’s cheaper and pretty sufficient for what it does (separating audio stem components). DeepAudio has DeepRemix included as well as some other tools, but it obviously isn’t a fuller version of DeepRemix.

RipX DeepAudio comes with DeepRemix world-leading audio separation, plus the DeepCreate MIDI/MPE, audio and sample song creation system, and then adds advanced stem clean-up and audio manipulation tools to the workflow

Source: https://hitnmix.com/audio-manipulation/

DeepAudio is billed as "Photoshop for Audio" and has many of the functions that RX and others mentioned here have. It's good value for money, especially if you regularly need to do stem separation in addition to more tradition repair jobs.

I’ve never heard of it being referred by people as “Photoshop for Audio”. Au contraire, I’ve heard of SpectraLayers being called this way, however I don’t think that with Adobe being a bad actor for a decade, one might be proud calling their product “Photoshop of whatever”

As a side note: DeepRemix is a paid front end of the free and open source Demucs: https://github.com/facebookresearch/demucs - an open source Python backend for stem separation.
RX, SpectraLayers, Acoustica, Virtual DJ and NeuralMix are using Spleeter:
https://github.com/deezer/spleeter - another open source Python stem separation backend.

[dangayle]

Yes, RX Advanced is a very useful Swiss Army knife of post processing utilities. According to some user comments not all of its functions work as well as with some of the alternatives, bit overall it’s a good tool. The only downside- it’s development had stalled since somewhere around version 7.

I started with 7 Advanced, and TBH, I should have stayed there. Like you mention, there haven't really been that many worthwhile improvements. Great on paper, but in practice not so much. Certainly nothing that warranted a full point release and upgrade cycle.

[equisonus]

I started with 7 Advanced, and TBH, I should have stayed there. Like you mention, there haven't really been that many worthwhile improvements. Great on paper, but in practice not so much. Certainly nothing that warranted a full point release and upgrade cycle.

Staying with RX7 Advanced doesn’t look like a bad idea. New features are really only a paper tiger, if some of them are just not working properly.

[sguyader]

As a side note: RipX DeepRemix is a front end of Demucs: https://github.com/facebookresearch/demucs - an open source Python backend for stem separation.
RX, SpectraLayers, Acoustica, Virtual DJ and NeuralMix are using Spleeter:
https://github.com/deezer/spleeter - another open source Python stem separation backend.

Thanks for the info! I just tried demucs on my mac mini, it works great!

[dangayle]

I don't even mind the improvements they have made, I just really detest the way they sell upgrades as new products instead of just updating them in place. Do a full upgrade every five years or so like Fabfilter, that's far less annoying. Better yet, do like U-he and just have one product that you upgrade in place, that maintains backwards compatibility.

I simply do not want 100 different RX Advanced plugins in my DAW. Add in the Ozone Advanced plugins and the rest, and you can easily have hundreds of essentially duplicate plugins if you need to maintain backwards compatibility with older sessions.

Imagine this with RX 7, RX 8, RX 9, RX 10. It's annoying and pointless.

[thiagodollor]

I just logged in to say thank you for taking your time and creating this list!

[kris.audioplanet]

Do you know of any other de-bleed software that separates or diminishes bleed? I had good results with some piano tracks that had too much drum bleed using either Music Rebalance in RX on LALA.AI (the latter being sometimes too much because it's an either on or off process) but I'm always on the look out for more

[revvy]

Back to RX for me with a nice, cheap upgrade path and a protection system which is far less bullshit than the alternative i was gonna buy. JFC, online for every 5 uses? No can do.

[himalaya]

I do a lot of audio restoration and RX has been my go-to for many tasks.

However, when it comes to denoising vocals RX has been dethroned by Waves Clarity VX Pro for me. Clarity represents the next level.

I'd be very interested to see more restoration plugins from Waves on the same level as Clarity VX.