iZotope's Jonathan Bailey on navigating the pandemic and future trends

Audio technology company iZotope has been creating groundbreaking software and plugins for mixing, mastering, restoration and more for the last two decades. Headliner recently caught up with the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based firm’s Chief Technology Officer, Jonathan Bailey to find out how they’ve been coping through the pandemic, how they set themselves apart from the competition, and what to expect next from the world of music tech.

Technologist, musician and iZotope CTO Jonathan Bailey joins Headliner on a Zoom call from “slightly chilly Brooklyn” at the start of January as he approaches his 10-year anniversary at the company.

Like most businesses, iZotope has been working on a strictly remote basis throughout the pandemic, something that’s not too unfamiliar for Bailey - most of his tenure at the company has seen him working in this way. That being said, his team have had to make some adjustments over the past eight or nine months:

“I actually joined when the company was much smaller, when we opened a little development office in New York City,” Bailey begins. “We’ve continued to grow and have mostly concentrated that growth in the Boston area.”

iZotope was founded in 2001, so it was already around 10 years old when Bailey joined. With product development, research and product management under his purview at the company, he is extremely well versed in creating unique offerings for its customers, the markets it pursues, along with the features and functionality that go into each carefully curated iZotope product.

“We feel that we differentiate ourselves by the strength of the core technology that we deliver on the products; essentially what they can do and what the algorithms are,” he says. “And so in order to feed that innovation engine, we have a dedicated advanced research team at the company.”

It was only after Bailey completed his degree at Berklee College of Music in his late 20s when he started to understand how to build the types of products that iZotope prides itself on today:

“I had some experience at smaller companies prior to joining iZotope which was only about 25 people when I arrived, and we’re just shy of 200 now, so it’s grown a tremendous amount since I’ve been with the business.”

As Bailey puts it, the current pandemic has been a “tale of two different cities”. For some businesses it has been catastrophic, while others have not only weathered the storm but thrived as a result. As a music technology provider, iZotope has been fortunate enough to fall into the latter category, tracking anonymous analytics and product development roadmaps to very clearly see where usage of its products spike when lockdowns are enforced.

The biggest change for iZotope throughout this period has in fact been a psychological one:

“From an economic standpoint, we didn’t really do much to change our plans; we continued on the path that we’re on,” shares Bailey. “The main change for the team was to learn how to work differently, especially for those having to juggle parenting. So creating a little bit of space for folks to navigate life quickly became our top priority as an executive team and amongst the peer group - trying some creative ways to be flexible and accommodating.”

iZotope’s R&D team consists of 40-45 engineers covering a range of disciplines, from software engineering to manual and automated testing. The teams are organized into different product lines, with one focused on iZotope’s music production-oriented products like Ozone, Neutron and VocalSynth.

The usage of RX — perhaps the company’s most versatile, widely used product — on the other hand is evenly split between music and other audio applications such as post production for film and TV.

Representing iZotope’s core business, and what is referred to internally as the “Suites” business, Bailey proceeds to give Headliner a rundown of these flagship products’ essential features:

“Ozone is primarily a mastering plugin and mastering product, and we call its main interface ‘the mothership’ because it has a whole bunch of capabilities,” explains Bailey. “There’s dynamics processing, EQ, a harmonic exciter, and other spectral processing within it, as well as some connective tissue capabilities that allow it to talk to some of our other products.

“The primary use case for Ozone is mastering however, and it really represents the cornerstone of the company. The very first product that iZotope made was something called Vinyl - essentially a vinyl sound filter emulator product that was released in 2001. We actually released Vinyl again in 2020 after rescanning it, fixing the bugs and making some extra touches, but it was soon after the original release of Vinyl that Ozone arrived on the scene, enabling people to do mastering themselves.”

So if Ozone in music production is your master bus plugin, then Neutron is your channel strip or mix bus plugin. Interestingly, the evolution from its predecessor Alloy into the Neutron we see today marks iZotope’s first foray into using machine learning in its product line:

“It was the first product that we shipped a neural network in, with the ability to label the incoming audio signal by its instrument type and use that to suggest presets or configuration settings for all of the processors based on the canon of mixing pedagogy,” Bailey adds. “That’s a capability called the Track Assistant, and we think it really does signal a pretty fundamental shift for our industry and what we thought was capable in the arena of signal processing.

“We still invest a lot as a company in what I call traditional DSP, but neural networks represent an ability to be able to work with varied and unique media content. We’ve put a lot of effort into exploring what we can do with that, and we’re excited about what we’ve discovered.”

Then there is RX, a utility knife for audio restoration, repair, and overall editing capabilities. It’s sweet spot lies in its ability to remove unwanted noise within an audio signal, whether that be in the form of an electrical hum from a noisy circuit, wind or background noise from location recording, or simply a record with too much reverb.

“RX allows you to extract the most important signal from a recording and use that in some other context,” says Bailey. “For example in one of the recent RX releases, we included a capability that allows you to unmix a four-part musical mixture, so if you wanted to separate the vocal or drum sound from a musical recording, the Music Rebalance feature allows you to do that.”

Meanwhile, iZotope also launched its first consumer electronics hardware product around three years ago in the form of an all-in-one device called the Spire Studio, a product aimed at musicians who have an appetite for making high quality recordings of their performances, but aren’t necessarily familiar with how to use digital audio workstations. Bailey says it’s within this part of the business where iZotope is targeting “pure musicians”:

“A lot of the same powerful technology that underpins our desktop products actually shows up in that product line, which is hardware mobile application,” he reveals. “There’s a cloud back end as well that we’ve been working on for the past couple of years, which does some of the magic behind the scenes.

“When we recently focused on usage analytics, a lot of the use cases and new functionality in the application were leaning more towards vocal production and top lining within hip-hop and rap. That’s an area where we’ve seen the app start to pop, because we’ve put some intention behind that, although over the coming months we’ll be redirecting our development efforts at other types of instrumentation and musical use cases for Spire.”