Today I was working on one of the uncertain tracks for the album. It contains quite the amount of crazy-awesome samples from old B-movies. Unfortunately for me, they are not of crazy-awesome quality. They clip, distort, the noise floor is insane. And there are lots of background noise, environmental foley I need to remove.

Izotope RX to the rescue. This piece of software blows me away every time I reach for it. I just got it earlier this fall to clean up some production work, but it has turned out to be the most clever investment in ages. RX can magically restore, remove, repair and reanimate anything. I haven't got time to provide A/B examples, but check out the audio demos at the Izotope website.

Most importantly for this track was to remove clipping and distortion. There were some brilliant dialogue that clipped hard, but RX took care of it. Removed the background foley. Then I could move the stuff into Melodyne, tune harmonic components and stretch consonant transient timing to fall in groove with the rhythm. Ah the wonders of topmodern music technology! Click the mouse pwn the house.

RX is not for everyone, if you do minimalist synthetic techno it is completely moot. But 90 percent of my music is painstakingly built up from vintage vinyl samples or B-movies or other questionable backwater dumps of previous century culture. Sometimes I want to retain the lofi sound, but sometimes I need to clean it up. For the latter, the spectral magic of RX is dead on.