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DL2Electron
what is music theory?

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Izotope Alloy 2 Review

Posted by DL2Electron - May 22nd, 2015


I had been deciding on upgrading my mixing software for a long time now having outgrown my stock plugins. Waves or Izotope. Both offered amazing possibilities and unparalled control. Even though Waves was offering the Platinum Bundle at a 70% discount not too long ago, in the end I went with Izotope Alloy 2 simply because I liked the sleek and modern interface much better. 

Anyway, Alloy 2 really is an awesome mixing plugin I got at a huge discount ($99). It is deceptively simple to use and is basically an all-in-one exciter, EQ, x2 compressors (single and 3 band mutliband), and a limiter. All-in-one is key here because you can't separate the mixing plugins in standalone. But that isn't going to restrict you in any way because you can directly tweak the signal flow in Alloy 2!

Alloy 2 has reduced the number of plugins I have to load up on in each insert drastically hence has made my mixing more fun than ever before. If I had gone with Waves, I would have to load up several plugins which would eat up my RAM and CPU along with any sample libraries loaded up. But with Alloy 2, just insert one per track and you're done! (Its surprisingly quite light on resources.)

Alloy 2 also comes with multiple useful shortcuts that my stock plugins simply don't have. For example, I can undo and redo changes on the fly. Basically this means I can easily compare my changes before and after with multiple tweaks, hence is a hugggge productivity boost. The highly customisable 8 band EQ allows you to solo into frequencies to allow you to quickly pinpoint offending frequencies. The multiband compressor is also amazing - it comes in with an auto dial in feature to pin point the exact bands of the audio signal, making multiband compressing easy as pie. It only comes with 3 bands (lo, mid and hi); and I'm sure UAD or Waves have got superior multiband comps; but for a hobbyist like me, 3 bands is more than enough to satisfy me for a looooong time. The exciter functions similarly to the multiband compressor, allowing you to colour the sound of the signal at different bands - which is extremely handy if you want to surgically sculpt your sound. And finally, the limiter does what it does best. Limit.

In conclusion, I'm really happy with my Alloy 2 purchase. Best investment I ever made and I'm sure to be using this for a long time to come.


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