Izotope RX 4 Advanced costs $1199.00. How can it be worth that much money?
 
I keep thinking I want it for the occasional clean up job, but I have a hard time justifying spending so much money for the infrequent use I expect I will make of it?
 
What does Izotope RX 4 Advanced do that is so special?
 
 
 
 
 

More of a case of what it can't do. It doesn't make the tea or coffee....... but it can be used to remove just about anything from audio. Clicks, thumps, crackles, reverb, etc etc., Isolate audio, split out mid and side channels, etc. etc., time and pitch stretch, recording, mastering. Chances are if there's something you want to do to a piece of audio it can do it. 
 
I don't use it a huge amount and have only really learnt a small proportion of what it is capable of. It's like R-mix on steroids, only mega-steroids. Much of it automated to make life a little easier. Yes other programs can do similar stuff but it might mean more than one program. It's all in one place in here and arguably easier/better at it.
 
Whether it's worth that sort of money is in the eye of the beholder though.

I have a client who has some music that exists on LPs, the master tapes disappeared down in the Caribbean. Maybe I can justify it for cleaning up some of their legacy audio.
 
 

RX4 is fine for most cleanup audio fix jobs.
 
RX4 Advanced has the dereverb support when cleaning up audio that has baked reverb RX4 Advanced can clean that up.  RX Advanced also has the Time & Pitch module that RX4 doesn't have.
 
Big studios or TV stations use RX Advanced features for audio editing / manipulations / cleanup.  that is where the Loudness module, EQ matching etc modules of Advanced come into play.
 
with regular RX4 you can cleanup a lot but then would need other tools to finish off the job that Advanced can do all in one product with automation a lot of the time.
 
is Advanced worth it?  not for my needs, I use RX3 and now RX4 once in a blue moon.  When I need it it's there and easy to get the job done quickly.  before getting RX3 and now RX4 I had to use a lot of different technics or tools to get the job done.  POPs, clicks, hiss especially in digitized tape or LP recordings or bad radio tuning recordings are cleaned up pretty quickly with RX4.
 
 

I think Advanced is pretty specialized and would only be worth it in very specific cases. If you have a bad recording for a current project the best option is still to redo the recording. Dereverb is a nice option and Advanced also comes with a really nice metering suite.

But the regular RX3/4 comes with a bunch of great "standard" denoising plugins plus the very powerful spectral editor for detailed editing. I honestly think it has the meat of the RX product line. The extra money is because those other plugs are quite unique and people who have to fix audio on a daily basis need them.

FWIW last spring I tried denoising some almost unintelligible family tapes and spent half a day fidgeting with gates and with Waves Denoising Suite. Ten minutes with RX3 standard gave me a great and eminently usable result. And I really mean ten minutes, that includes learning where the buttons were.

We use regular RX at the studio for most all our forensic and restoration work. If I had any sense (and the geetus) I'd have Advanced. But for most stuff any musical hobbiest is likely to need or want...Advanced is overkill.

I use RX all the time, but mainly because it's a lot easier to see audio events in their spectrum display than it is in other tools (like WaveLab).  I use it (the standalone application) to place markers at events/transitions in live recordings so I know what I need to extract in later steps.  Occasionally, I'll also use it for what it was designed for, like removing pops and feedback and the like.
 
I'll have to admit that the new RX Document format they introduced in RX4 is a pain in the @$$ (at least for my workflow).  It means I have to export the result as a wav file rather than just saving the stupid thing.
 
...and...NO...I can't see spending $1,200 for the Advanced version just to remove reverb.

Sounds like maybe it would be useful for forensics. But that's not a very big market to amortize the r&d costs.

Anderton
Sounds like maybe it would be useful for forensics. But that's not a very big market to amortize the r&d costs.

That may well be the point.  The more vertical the market...the higher the cost per seat to recoup your development costs.
 
For the basic version though...$350 is well worth it.  I first got into it because the venue I got my recordings from had massive ground hum issues.  That finally got solved, but the existing recordings still needed to be made listenable.  Once the tool was in house though, I wondered how I did anything without it.

I have a lot of old recordings where the kick and snare are way too loud. Would the regular RX4 work for that scenario?