Top all-time · #3026
iZotope
Company blog · izotope.com/en/learnother
iZotope is the company blog at izotope.com. Since 2011, 26 different Hacker News readers have linked it 35 times, most often “Digital Audio Basics: Audio Sample Rate and Bit Depth”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-30, and you can follow it by feed.
Rarely recommended · 3 of 30 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link iZotope's Learn articles to explain audio topics such as dithering, loudness, sampling rates and mastering. Most other links point to its RX audio repair software product pages.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 30 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
iZotope develops award-winning audio software and plug-ins for mixing, mastering, restoration, and more.
Most-linked posts?
- /en/products/rx.html5 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2019-10-31
- Digital Audio Basics: Audio Sample Rate and Bit Depth2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-10-31
- /en/products/repair-and-edit/rx-post-production-suite.html2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-09-29
What Hacker News says?
Music, as tracked by Billboard, cross genre, is as loud as ever. Here’s a survey of Billboard music: https://www.izotope.com/en/learn/mastering-trends?srsltid=Af... I have an Audio Developer Conference talk about this topic if you care to follow the history of it. I have softened my stance a bit on the criticism of the 90’s (yeah, people were using lookahead limiting over exuberantly because of its newness) but the…
Comment linking /en/learn/mastering-trends?srsltid=AfmBOopSQ5591RvCnjAUcaU-hlntrCKX0AabuTneKmIoDV6EFCq0fTbn
on “The 'Toy Story' You Remember”Submitted iZotope, Brainworx, and Plugin Alliance Are Now Part of Native Instruments as a story · 2 points
HN discussionNo, not even remotely. Izotope RX: https://www.izotope.com/en/products/rx.html
Comment linking /en/products/rx.html
on “AudioMass – free, open source, web-based Audio and Waveform editor”Submitted Digital Audio Basics: Audio Sample Rate and Bit Depth as a story · 2 points
HN discussionA tool used by anyone and everyone in the audio space: https://www.izotope.com/en/products/rx.html - it's most important feature is that while you can work on the waveform, that's pretty much the least useful way to work with audio, and so it also lets you work directly on the spectrogram of an audio source instead, which makes editing the actual sounds you hear much, much easier.
Comment linking /en/products/rx.html
on “AudioMass – free, open source, web-based Audio and Waveform editor”Submitted iZotope (Audio DSP) Acquires Imagine Research (Sound Recognition) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionNot in this context. "RX 7, The industry standard for audio repair": https://www.izotope.com/en/products/rx.html
Comment linking /en/products/rx.html
on “AudioMass – free, open source, web-based Audio and Waveform editor”Submitted IZotope releases free iOS Audio programming guide as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI don't think that's fair. Even major audio companies were warning customers not to upgrade to Sierra for months due to compatibility issues. Here's iZotope's page about compatibility with their audio plugins - if you bought it more than a couple of years ago, it won't work on Sierra: https://www.izotope.com/en/community/blog/product-news/2016/... Personally I had to spend a few hundred dollars upgrading my audio so…
Comment linking /en/community/blog/product-news/2016/08/operating-system-news--macos-sierra-and-izotope.html
on “Visual Studio for Mac”Ads are louder as an industry standard. In 2012, USA tried to implement the CALM act, which mandated content and ads to be at the same level (“A/85”), but it didn’t play out because ads are measured individually whereas a program is measured as a whole. Complaints to the FCC are still about the loudness of ads… See https://www.izotope.com/en/learn/the-mixers-guide-to-loudnes...
Comment linking /en/learn/the-mixers-guide-to-loudness-for-broadcast.html
on “You block ads in your browser, why not in your city?”iZotope Inc | Software Engineer | Cambridge, MA | Onsite iZotope is seeking a Software Engineer for a position on our Spire product development team, creating the next generation recording studio. You’ll be joining a cross functional software team, responsible for the software running on the Spire Studio hardware device and our iOS/Android Spire applications. Your focus will be the Spire Studio application, but expe…
Comment linking /en/company/careers/jobs/engineering/Software-engineer.html
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2018)”iZotope, Inc | Embedded Software Engineer | Cambridge Boston, MA | ONSITE Come help us build the next generation recording studio with Spire ( https://www.spire.live/ )! We are seeking a highly motivated individual for an embedded applications engineering position for iZotope’s hardware products. This position will assume primary responsibility for developing, porting and maintaining the firmware for the hardware pr…
Comment linking /en/company/careers/jobs/engineering/embedded-software-engineer1.html
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (November 2018)”Oof. Making undergrad course project reports available for the world to see! ;) The third member of that team has also built some pretty cool technology -- maybe behind some of the music you're listening to right now: https://www.izotope.com/
Comment linking /
on “An update to the Timescale license”I'd also be interested in how it compares to iZotope RX's Music Rebalance (examples from earlier releases here: https://www.izotope.com/en/learn/stem-isolation-music-rebala... ).
Comment linking /en/learn/stem-isolation-music-rebalance.html
on “StemRoller – Isolate vocals, drums, bass, and other stems from any song”The loss of information from a reduction of bit depth is purely a reduction of signal-to-noise ratio; the least significant bit is dithered to eliminate quantization distortion. In normal domestic listening scenarios this is usually imperceptible, because the noise floor imposed by dither is below the threshold of hearing for any reasonable gain staging. https://www.izotope.com/en/learn/what-is-dithering-in-audio....
Comment linking /en/learn/what-is-dithering-in-audio.html
on “Canyon.mid”iZotope RX. https://www.izotope.com/en/products/repair-and-edit/rx.html
Comment linking /en/products/repair-and-edit/rx.html
on “Audio AI: isolating vocals from stereo music using Convolutional Neural Networks”Does anyone know if this is related to the new iZotope RX 7 vocal isolation & stemming tools? It does seem to be talking about something similar, especially when it mentions using the same technique to split a song into instrument stems. (Or to put it another way - there is commercial music software released in the last year that lets you do this yourself now.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEauVQv2Quc https://www…
Comment linking /en/products/repair-and-edit/rx/music.html
on “Audio AI: isolating vocals from stereo music using Convolutional Neural Networks”Small nitpick: CD quality is in fact 44.1khz. The nyquist theorem essentially says you need to use a sampling rate twice as high as the highest frequencies you want to record and reproduce. The article gets the gist of this right, just the cd quality numbers wrong. Izotope has a really good article that goes into digital to analog conversion, sampling rates, and the history behind them. https://www.izotope.com/en/le…
Comment linking /en/learn/digital-audio-basics-sample-rate-and-bit-depth.html
on “How to create minimal music with code in any programming language”I'd generally try iZotope RX for cleaning up audio - Dialogue Isolate is probably the exact feature you would want (and I gather is often used in movies to clean up on location dialogue), but it's only in the most expensive Advanced version: https://www.izotope.com/en/products/rx/features/dialogue-iso... Cheaper versions of RX still have various noise reduction tools, de-verb for reducing reverb and room echo, and a…
Comment linking /en/products/rx/features/dialogue-isolate.html
on “Spleeter – Music Source-Separation Engine”Well there are different tools to clear up a audio track. $50 will get Audio Cleaning Lab. If I was home I would do a quick auto clean and then hand scrube the file. http://www.magix.com/us/audio-cleaning-lab/detail/ $1199 will get you iZotope’s RX. I actually normally get better results form the $50 one then when I use this tool at a friend's shop. https://www.izotope.com/en/products/repair-and-edit/rx-post-... Spe…
Comment linking /en/products/repair-and-edit/rx-post-production-suite.html
on “RNNoise: Learning Noise Suppression”Thank you so much! Yes, this is a great application of AI. We'll be adding that functionality in soon, but in the meantime you might be interested to learn about the work that Izotope is doing with Ozone: https://www.izotope.com/en/learn/ai-mastering.html
Comment linking /en/learn/ai-mastering.html
on “Launch HN: Soundry AI (YC W24) – Music sample generator for music creators”Yep, iZotope RX7 has a 10-day free trial. The feature you're looking for is Music Rebalance: https://www.izotope.com/en/products/rx.html
Comment linking /en/products/rx.html
on “Ask HN: How to remove voice from a music file?”What is interesting about this to me is that 99.9% of music mastered and produced in 2021 has a digital step somewhere along the chain i.e. whatever perceived technical advantage the physical medium has in terms of sound fidelity is actually not really there and in any case limited by digital to analog conversion and vice versa. Vinyl as a music format has certain limitations [0] which will mean that even a perfect…
Comment linking /en/learn/mastering-for-vinyl-tips-for-digital-mastering-engineers.html
on “Vinyl records are now outselling CDs”Izotope RX is a Swiss Army knife for these kinds of tasks: https://www.izotope.com/en/products/rx.html
Comment linking /en/products/rx.html
on “Open call – your field recordings of obsolete sounds wanted”you might be interested in MetaSynth ( http://www.uisoftware.com/MetaSynth/index.php ) & Izotope's Iris ( http://www.izotope.com/products/audio/iris/ ) which basically offer the converse of what you're doing here. fascinating from both a technical & a sound design point of view. the former's what Aphex Twin used to insert his face into the Windowlicker"" spectrogram: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windowlicker#Backgro…
Comment linking /products/audio/iris/
on “Computational Synesthesia: Audio Analysis with Image Processing Algorithms”Definitely, and there are specialized plugins and EQ presets for this, as well for other media, such as vinyl. Have a look at this article about mastering for different streaming platforms https://www.izotope.com/en/learn/mastering-for-streaming-pla... (from a software manufacturer)
Comment linking /en/learn/mastering-for-streaming-platforms.html
on “Audiophile forum debating which versions of memcpy had the highest sound quality (2013)”Psychoacoustics and "perceptual audio coding" are the search terms you were looking for, here's a couple of links: https://www.izotope.com/en/learn/psychoacoustics-how-percept... https://www.i-programmer.info/babbages-bag/1222-mp3.html http://www0.cs.ucl.ac.uk/teaching/GZ05/05-music-coding.pdf
Comment linking /en/learn/psychoacoustics-how-perception-influences-music-production.html
on “How Well Can You Hear Audio Quality? (2015)”lol strange line in the sand to draw. Izotope Ozone uses AI to mix and master - for some reason that’s okay but you can’t actually generate the sounds with AI? Or what if I generate the notes with AI then use my own synth presets is that allowed? https://www.izotope.com/en/products/ozone
Comment linking /en/products/ozone
on “AI Generated Music Barred from Bandcamp”I've done audio engineering as a hobby. Even a decade ago, verbiage like "ai noise reduction" was very common. Of course that was RNNs, not transformers. But I think they have a valid point. I googled and found this 2017 post about iZotope integrating machine learning: https://www.izotope.com/en/learn/what-the-machine-learning-i...
Comment linking /en/learn/what-the-machine-learning-in-rx-6-advanced-means-for-the-future-of-audio-repair-technology
on “AI Generated Music Barred from Bandcamp”Another category is audio software plugins (aka VSTs / AudioUnits), which are sometimes sold in bundles of $1000 or more. The plugins often cost more than the software that runs the plugins. Take a look at the Waves bundles: https://www.waves.com/bundles#sort:path~type~order=.hidden-p... Or some of the iZotope products: https://www.izotope.com/en/products/repair-and-edit/rx-post-... Certainly many of their customers…
Comment linking /en/products/repair-and-edit/rx-post-production-suite.html
on “Ask HN: Who is the target audience for ~$1000 software?”
