In this in-depth article we unpack all the new features introduced with Neutron 3 from iZotope and help you to be able to get the best out of Neutron 3 as well as sharing what we think about this latest release from iZotope.

The headline feature in the new version of Neutron from iZotope comes from the continued development by iZotope of their machine learning technology, which is what is under the hood of the growing number of ‘Assistant’ tools in the iZotope family of products.

iZotope claim that the new Mix Assistant in Neutron 3 Advanced is the first plug-in that listens to the entire session, by communicating with every track in the mix back to the main Neutron 3 ‘mothership’ plug-in, with the aim of creating a balanced starting point for an initial mix built around a focus chosen by the mixer, all designed to save time and energy for creative mix decisions.

The other headline addition in Neutron 3 is a new Sculptor module again with machine learning spectral shaping.

Sit down and enjoy as we take you through what’s new in Neutron 3 from iZotope, show you in exclusive demos how it works and share what we think about Neutron 3 from iZotope.

3 Different Flavours Of iZotope Neutron 3 - Neutron Elements, Neutron 3 Standard And Neutron 3 Advanced

Here is a feature summary for each of the flavours of Neutron 3…

What iZotope Say About Neutron 3

iZotope Product Manager Dan Gonzalez told us…

“Neutron 3 moves us closer to a world where technology enables what all our customers love doing; being creative and making music. Our customers are always finding innovative ways to use our Assistants to benefit their workflow and Mix Assistant is no different. With machine learning, we’re helping everyone get to a great starting point for their mix, so they can stay focused on their creative input. I’m personally very excited to see where this takes music making.”

iZotope Neutron 3 Advanced has 4 different ‘Assistants’

• The New Mix Assistant which enables you to be able to choose a focal point for a mix and let Neutron 3 Advanced automatically set levels before you ever have to touch a fader.

• An enhanced Track Assistant that listens to your audio and creates a custom preset for you based on what it hears.

• The Visual Mixer from which you can also launch Mix Assistant and move tracks in a virtual space, tapping into iZotope-enabled inter-plugin communication.

• A new Sculptor Module that uses iZotope spectral shaping to make instrument tracks sound more like themselves...or something else entirely.

The new Mix Assistant is just one way Neutron 3 is changing the way we mix. iZotope describe the new Sculptor Module Sculptor module as “The be-all, end-all of audio goodness”. Sculptor is a new module which available in Neutron 3 Standard, and Advanced for sweetening, fixing, and creative applications. Using never-before-seen signal processing, Sculptor works like a per-band army of compressors and EQs to shape any track. It also communicates with Track Assistant to understand each instrument and gives real-time feedback to help shape tracks to a target EQ curve, or experiment with new sounds. You can choose from 25 unique instrument profiles to shape your instrument into a totally new version of itself.

Neutron 3 includes new improvements and enhancements based on feedback from users, such as the redesigned Masking Meter that automatically flags masking issues and allows them to be fixed from a convenient one-window display.

Neutron 3 has also had a major overhaul in performance for faster processing and load times and smooth metering. Sessions with multiple Neutrons open much quicker, and refresh rates for visualizations have doubled.

The iZotope Tonal Balance Control has been updated to help you shape a balanced mix based on tens-of-thousands of professional mixes.

Neutron 3 is actually 8 tools in one package enabling you to build your signal chain within one connected, intelligent interface with: Sculptor, EQ with Soft Saturation mode, Transient Shaper, 2 Compressors, Gate, Exciter, and Limiter modules. With Neutron 3 Advanced you also get all 8 modules as separate plug-ins to use as you wish in your DAW.

For post people and users mixing in surround the good news is that iZotope Neutron 3 Advanced supports 7.1 surround sound and there is also a zero-latency mode for all 8 modules for lightweight processing in audio post or surround music mixing workflows.

iZotope Neutron 3 Advanced Now Has 4 Different ‘Assistants’

1. The New Mix Assistant which enables you to be able to choose a focal point for a mix and let Neutron 3 Advanced automatically set levels before you ever have to touch a fader.

2. An enhanced Track Assistant that listens to your audio and creates a custom preset for you based on what it hears.

3. The Visual Mixer from which you can launch Mix Assistant and move tracks in a virtual space, tapping into iZotope-enabled inter-plugin communication.

4. A new Sculptor Module that uses iZotope spectral shaping to make instrument tracks sound more like themselves...or something else entirely.

What Is The Difference between the Mix Assistant and Track Assistant? Mix Assistant is the new assistive feature in Neutron 3 Advanced. In Mix Assistant, you can choose Track Enhance to run Track Assistant on a specific track and create a custom preset, or you can choose Balance to balance the track levels in your session. As Neutron 3 Standard doesn’t include the new Mix Assistant, you will just see Track Assistant as the option to select on the top of the plug-in.

How To Get The Best Out of Mix Assistant in iZotope Neutron 3 Advanced

There are a few things that can cause Mix Assistant to not perform as well as it could and here are 3 helpful guidelines to get the best from iZotope’s latest Assistant..

1. Mix Assistant should be used on Tracks or Buses only, not both.

2. Use only 1 Relay, Neutron mothership, or Neutron component plug-in per track as a source for Mix Assistant.

3. Do not use Mix Assistant on Sends and FX Returns.

It is best to run Mix Assistant right at the beginning of the mix stage, ideally before you start adding EQ, compression, effects etc and also before you do any panning.

Consider Mix Assistant as your studio assistant who will comes in ahead of you, to set up the session, getting the levels for each track correct so that you can start the mix process knowing that the level architecture is where it should be.

Mix Assistant is not an automated mix tool and its not designed to finish your mix. Instead it has been designed so that once you've achieved an initial level balance with Mix Assistant, you can move onto applying other processing, such as compression, EQ, and panning the elements of your mix.

Because it is a mix setup tool, there is no automation options with Mix Assistant. Remember that Mix Assistant is only setting an initial, static balance for your tracks. You can then go in and add automation to your faders and plug-ins just as before. The less you have set up, the easier it is for Mix Assistant to help you.

The best way to work is to use Mix Assistant before using Track Assistant. It is crucial to understand that Mix Assistant is designed to help you set up your session levels. Mix Assistant will provide you the best results when you begin with a new, untouched session. You cannot use Track Assistant and Mix Assistant simultaneously. Use Mix Assistant first and then Track Assistant, and don’t worry neither Assistants will overwrite the other.

In this exclusive video demo we show you how to use the new Mix Assistant on to prepare a Pro Tools session for mixing…

Once Mix Assistant has done its job you can move onto Track Assistant, which is another assistive tool that has been designed by iZotope to offer an intelligent starting point for each individual track, not the whole mix. Trained through machine learning, Track Assistant listens carefully to individual tracks and provides unique suggestions by dialing in different parameters within Neutron.

Track Assistant is designed to work on one track at a time and is not aware of the track’s context to your session. The suggested workflow is is to instantiate a Neutron plug-in on each track you want help on and then use the Track Assistant mode offer suggestions on how to improve the sound on this track. With Track Assistant you don’t need to play the whole tsong, unlike Mix Assistant, Track Assistant needs around 10 seconds or so to get a feel of the specific track.

Learn More About How To Use Mix Assistant in Neutron 3 Advanced With This Tutorial From iZotope

The NEW Sculptor Module

The second new module is Sculptor, which is available to you either as a module in the main Neutron 3 window or as a separate plug-in with Neutron 3 Advanced.

Sculptor is a spectral shaping tool that brings clarity and polish to audio tracks by being able to removing muddiness, reducing harshness, and help shape your tracks into better versions of themselves.

Spectral shaping is multiband processing taken to the extreme. Instead of processing say 4 frequency bands, as you would with conventional multiband processing, spectral shaping processes the signal across up to 32 frequency bands, allowing for a control that is more tailored for the signal. Compression thresholds can be set toward a desired spectral shape or remain adaptively adjustable to compress the signal “toward itself”, i.e. its own time-averaged spectral shape. The iZotope developers have worked hard so we don’t need to have access all these different settings for these 32 bands. The Sculptor module has a very simple interface with a spectral analysis to show what is going on and 3 main controls, Amount, Tone and Speed. In this exclusive video demo, we try the Sculptor module on a couple of tracks in te session we prepped with Mix Assistant…

Learn More About How To Use Sculptor in Neutron 3 With This Tutorial From iZotope

What We Think Of Neutron 3 From iZotope

Maybe the name ‘Mix Assistant’ gives the wrong first impression, that it is a tool that will analyse all your tracks then throw up a completed mix for you to tweak. So from the get-go, let me make it clear this is not what Mix Assistant is about. Perhaps it would be better called Mix Prep Assistant. In my view the new Mix Assistant in iZotope Neutron 3 is your virtual studio assistant. The person who would come in early and set up your session, get all the level architecture set up ready for you to come in and start doing the fun bit - mixing.

It’s also great news for people developing their skills and maybe haven’t completely understood gain staging. For Pro Tools users, the Relay plug-ins effectively are programmable channel gain trims with options for panning and stereo width. All of which makes it very useful for beginner and high-end professional alike. I tried to use Mix Assistant on a mixed track and even though I flattened the faders etc, it couldn’t do its job properly. It really is designed to be that first level-setting stage, right at the beginning of a mix and as iZotope stress, works best on raw unprocessed audio.

With Mix Assistant, iZotope have taken their Inter Plug-in Communication (IPC) framework to the next level and confirms one of the predictions we listed for 2018 and discussed in our article 5 Audio Recording Industry Predictions For 2018 - Check Out How We Did.

In using Mix Assistant we came up with two issues, which in discussion with the team at iZotope are limitations of what you can and cannot do in Pro Tools and so are not iZotope’s fault.

The first is that when you go to add an instance of Relay to every track, Pro Tools puts multi-mono instances on any stereo or other multi-channel tracks, which precludes the use of the panning and stereo width features in the Relay plug-in. The workaround in Pro Tools is to change the multi-mono instances for stereo instances. I tried creating instances from a stereo track rather than a mono track but that just created multi-channel plug-in instances of Relay on the stereo tracks and didn’t do anything on the mono tracks.

The second Pro Tools related issue is that all the instances of Relay in the Neutron plug-in are listed in alphabetically rather than in track order. Take a look at the image above. On the left is the Focus window in the Mix Assistant and as you can see it lists the Relay plug-ins in alphabetical order, whereas on the right we have a Relay plug-in and as you can see the plug-ins are listed in track order. This difference, makes finding the instances of the Relay plug-in anywhere in Neutron 3 less than intuitive, whether it be in the Focus window, or the Neutron 3 plug-in or the Visual Mixer.

Again this isn’t something iZotope can do anything about because Avid does not currently provide track order information to plug-ins and so iZotope are stuck with displaying the Relay instances in alphabetical order. It would require a change from Avid in the plug-in SDK (software development kit) to enable this to work. To be fair to Avid though, inter plug-in communication is relatively new, until now plug-ins haven’t needed to know about what is going on in other tracks, but with the growth of interplug-in communication maybe it is time for Avid to review the AAX plug-in SDK and add support for track layout sooner rather than later.

Moving onto the Sculptor module, this is another one of these plug-ins where the simple user interface belies what is going on under the hood. Like a Swan, above the surface of the water gliding effortlessly, whilst under the water the feet are paddling furiously to swim against the river current.

From Sculptor’s user interface, like the swan, you are not aware of the 32 bands of multiband processing providing spectral shaping optimised for the type of instrument you are working on. It’s another example, like the other ‘assistants’, where iZotope’s clever technology is taking the mundane or the complex and making it easy to be creative, rather than getting bogged down with complex user interfaces you can’t understand, which is what the Sculptor module could have been like, or boring repetitive mundane tasks like level setting that the new Mix Assistant now can now take care of.

iZotope have got the balance right with these ‘assistants’. The Mix Assistant is not an automated, machine learning mixing algorithm, it is a tool designed to help you get the foundations in place so you can use your own creativity to produce your own mix in your style. The Track Assistant can then help you with the next level of mixing offering ideas and suggestions that you can chose to run with and then put your own stamp on.

My only word of caution with all these assistants, is don’t come to depend on these tools to do the work to such an extent that you don’t bother to learn the foundational principles of audio production. If you do, then if something isn’t right, you won’t have the knowledge and understanding to fix it.

Something that should not be overlooked amongst the new features that come with iZotope Neutron 3 are the improvements in performance and the new user interface.

On the performance side, sessions with Neutron 3 load up to 3 times faster than the same sessions using Neutron 2, so less time waiting for the session to load, which is great because with these new tools there are likely to be many more instances of Neutron 3 and related tools in sessions. Neutron 3 uses up to half the memory of Neutron 2, which has got to be good news as we see the new operating systems taking up more and more memory. Neutron 3 uses up to a third of the CPU of Neutron 2 at the lowest buffer sizes, which is again, good news because I see more instances of Neutron 3 being in sessions because of iZotope’s Inter Plug-in Communication.

After all if you have a choice between a plug-in that can talk to other plug-ins and work together with features like Masking or use a plug-in that acts as an island, it’s a no-brainer surely?

Moving on to the user interface, I am a huge fan of resizable plug-in windows, as it gives me control as to how I use my screen real-estate, so that’s another win for iZotope and Neutron 3.

Take a look at these two images, one is Neutron 2 and the other Neutron 3…

The Neutron 2 user interface looks OK until you see the same set up in Neutron 3 and realise how much less cluttered it looks. It’s all there but it’s so much cleaner and easier to use. What’s not to like? Thank you iZotope.

The manual is a breath of fresh air. It is very detailed with lots of advice on how to get the best out of everything in Neutron 3 Advanced. As someone who spends more time than most, reading manuals to get to grips and learning new tools, the manual can be of little help, or as in this case a huge help. It is clear that iZotope have worked extra specially hard to get the Neutron 3 manual complete from the get-go. Top marks from me for this.

Finally in the spirit of full disclosure, Neutron has never really found a home in my workflow. RX, absolutely, I couldn’t be without it, but Neutron has never really lit my fire. Neutron 3 might change this, with the inter plug-in communication that extends beyond Neutron and the Relay plug-in to other instances of Neutron 3 as well as Nectar 3 and Vocalsynth 2. The addition of support for mixes up to 7.1 is also good news, although it’s a shame that iZotope didn’t go the last mile and include support for Dolby Atmos with 7.1.4 and above, maybe one for Neutron 3.1? But it is the help under the hood and the IPC that could be the turning points for me using Neutron more in my workflows.

Pros

• Mix Assistant

• Sculptor Module

• Much less cluttered user interface

• Improved Performance

Cons

• Relay plug-ins not in track order in the Neutron 3 plug-in but this isn’t iZotope’s fault, its a limitation of the DAW’s SDK.

• Relay Plug-ins get instantiated as multi-mono plug-ins in Pro Tools when you insert them across a session with mixed channel counts. Again this is not iZotope’s fault, its a limitation of the Pro Tools AAX Plug-in SDK.

• No support yet for Dolby Atmos channel formats.

3 Different Flavours Of iZotope Neutron 3 - Neutron Elements, Neutron 3 Standard And Neutron 3 Advanced - Check Out Which Version Has All The Features You Need…

Neutron 3 System Requirements

• Operating systems:

  • Mac — OS X 10.11.6 El Capitan—macOS 10.14 Mojave

  • PC — Win 7 (64-bit)—Win 10 (64-bit)

• Plug-in formats:

  • AAX (64-bit), AU, VST2, VST3 *All formats are 64-bit only.

• Supported hosts: Ableton Live 9—10, Cubase 9.5, Digital Performer 9, FL Studio 12, Logic Pro X, Nuendo 8, Pro Tools 10—12, Reaper 5, Reason 10, Studio One 3—4

iZotope Neutron 3 Pricing

Note that Visual Mixer and iZotope Relay will be Included free with all Neutron 3 Advanced demo downloads. In addition, Music Production Suite 2.1 will now include Neutron 3 Advanced, and iZotope Elements Suite will be updated to include Neutron Elements (v3)…

• Neutron Elements (v3) - $129 MSRP ($99 introductory pricing until June 30th 2019)

• Neutron 3 Standard - $249 MSRP ($199 introductory pricing until June 30th 2019)

• Neutron 3 Advanced - $399 MSRP ($299 introductory pricing until June 30th 2019)

• Music Production Suite 2.1 - $999 MSRP ($599 introductory pricing until June 30th 2019)

• Mix & Master Bundle, Advanced - $699 MSRP ($499 introductory pricing until June 30th 2019)

• Mix & Master Bundle, Standard - $349 MSRP ($299 introductory pricing until June 30th 2019)

• Elements Suite (v4) - $199 MSRP ($149 introductory pricing until June 30th 2019)

• Neutron 3 Visual Mixer - Free (with a 10 day demo download of Neutron 3 Advanced)