iZotope RX 4 has released, bringing even more fantastic new noise reduction and audio repair tools targeted at post production audio professionals. Sadly, all the new enticing features only exist in the stand-alone application, not as plugins within Pro Tools. However, iZotope has developed a clever way to “round trip” your audio from Pro Tools into the stand-alone RX application and back. Read on to see how.
So you have a session open in Pro Tools, and you want to use one of the new RX Advanced features like EQ Match or Leveler. First, open the RX Application so you can send audio into it.
Then back in Pro Tools open the “RX Connect” AudioSuite plugin.
You can now select a clip in Pro Tools and hit the “send” button on the RX Connect AudioSuite plugin to send the clip into RX Advanced.
Select a clip and hit “send” to shoot it over to RX Advanced.
Now the clip has made it into RX Advanced. But Pro Tools has control over my speakers. How do I hear anything??
At this point you’ve managed to send your clip into RX, but of course Pro Tools has control over your monitor speakers and doesn’t like to share. So how do you hear anything in RX Advanced? This is where iZotope has gotten clever. You have to set up a new aux track to serve as an input monitor, and route RX Advanced into it. Here’s how.
First, create a new stereo aux track in your Pro Tools session and insert the iZotope RX4 Monitor plugin.
By default, the RX Monitor plugin will be disconnected. It’ll look like this in Pro Tools:
To fix this, you’ll need to go into the preferences for the RX Advanced application and change the audio driver choice. Set it to RX Monitor.
Now the plugin in Pro Tools will say “connected.”
At this point, hit play in the RX Advanced application and you will hear the audio play through your aux track in Pro Tools. You can now use tools like EQ Match, Leveler, and others that aren’t available as stand-alone plugins within Pro Tools.
Once you’ve made the changes you like, you must send the audio back into Pro Tools. Make sure that you still have the “RX Connect” AudioSuite plugin open in Pro Tools in order for it to be able to receive the returned audio. Then click the sneaky little “Send Back” button in RX Advanced to return the audio to the Pro Tools AudioSuite plugin.
Notice the sneaky “send back” button in the blue tab above the waveform view.
The audio will now be loaded into the AudioSuite plugin, and you can click the “render” button to return the audio to the selection on your Pro Tools timeline.
This assumes that you haven’t updated or lost the selection on your timeline. If you have no selection anymore, you will get the typical Pro Tools error:
But you can simply re-create the selection, and then hit render again. In fact, you can create a selection anywhere on your timeline and hit render, and the plugin will dump out your audio clip onto the timeline.
So this is the new workflow for the stand-alone iZotope RX Advanced application in conjunction with Pro Tools. Now go clean up some audio!
Alexey,
Thank you for putting this up, i’ve wanted to see a more detailed review and someone go more in-depth on how the standalone app impacts it’s functionality within PT.
I was in town the other week for the AES convention, stopped by Larson but must of missed ya. Congratulations on the mix position, that’s awesome.
Hope all is well, talk to ya soon
– Danny Maurer
Just acquired RX4 Advanced and could not get audio playback during PT sessions… Thanks for solving that problem for me! Surprised that setting up RX Monitor on my two PC systems was not covered by any Izotope documentation that I could easily find; but your step by step works fine!
I have a problem. When I click “render” only I see a new file in the cliplist but it isn’t replaced.
What can I Do
Thanks for the info. I appreciate that the standalone is more powerful than the plugin for Spectral Repair but this whole round about way to use it is a considerable pain in the ass compared to previously. I used to use SR a lot for quick fixes like de-popping but probably not anymore.
i dont have the sendback botton. how can i fix it?