New Music Gear Monday: iZotope Aurora Intelligent Reverb Plugin

AI sometimes gets a bad rap, but when it helps you to do a job faster and better, it’s difficult to argue that it’s not useful. Such is the case with the new iZotope Aurora intelligent reverb plugin. Even going back to the analog days, mixers have always tuned their reverbs by adding EQ to make them fit better in the mix. Aurora does that for you automatically, which can make it a great time-saver, while providing great reverb sounds as well.

Different From The Start

First of all, picture Aurora as a typical reverb plugin, having an amount, Pre-Delay and Decay controls along with 6 different reverb types: hall, room, chamber, plate, ambience, and cathedral.

What first strikes you as different is the Width and Tone controls, which are simple left-to-right sliders that are easy to dial in. Then you have the high and low pass filters, which again appear as sliders under the large frequency display in the middle of the plugin, and show the frequencies that are rolled off in green. Those features are big improvements over most reverb plugins right there.

It’s All In The Unmasking

But the big breakthrough comes in the plugin’s unmasking abilities. Like previous iZotope products, the parameters are easy to set mostly because they’re dialed in for you. What I mean is that as soon as Aurora senses a signal, it knows exactly what it is and exactly what frequencies need to be controlled, and shows you which areas are being unmasked in the display. The best part is that, unlike EQ where once you dial it in the effect is static, Aurora only adds the unmasking when it’s needed, which means a lusher reverb sound without getting in the way of the mix element.

If you want to tweak the unmasking, there are Attack, Release, Sensitivity, and a master amount control on the right side. You can also bypass the unmasking or just listen to the frequencies that the plugin is controlling.

There’s a Solo Reverb button on the top right for 100% reverb when used on an aux return buss, master Bypass, and 60 presets if you want the plugin to do most of the work for you. Oh, and the reverbs are based on the excellent Exponential Audio algorithms so they sound great.

Aurora is the next generation of the reverb plugins and well worth checking out. It’s only $49 right now, and even cheaper if you want to cross-grade from another iZotope product. Find out more here, or watch the video below for more info.

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