Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1122868
Outstanding Product – Post-Production iZotope RX 7 by Devendra Cleary CAS MEET THE WINNERS iZotope RX is a mainstay in the audio post-production industry. The quality and impact of their product on post work is prevalent through the multiple times it's received this award, not to mention that their software is often used as a verb: "I'll RX it." I scheduled a phone interview with senior product manager Mike Rozett and received a wealth of fascinating material. The company he works for, plus the story of his professional journey, is enough to inspire any sound professional new or seasoned. MIKE ROZETT: Senior Product Manager at iZotope, Inc. Talk to me about your work with the development of RX 7. I've been with iZotope for about two years and RX was started more than 10 years ago. It's really just evolved over time by our team looking at some of the things we can build on our end to solve the problems that we keep hearing from customers. Some of those problems are always revolving around: How can I do something faster? How can I do something with less mouse clicks? How can I clean up audio in the shortest amount of time possible? Basically, nobody in the history of this business has ever said, "We definitely had too much money and we had too much time, I wish we'd had less of both." There's always that need for us to keep refining what we've done and to find new ways to improve our processing. RX 7 was the first version of the product that you were part of from start to finish. Tell me about the process. There's a research and development team and they're always looking at new and exciting trends in their field, whether it con- nects to audio directly or not isn't important at an initial stage, it's just looking and seeing what the trends are in their field. Then they look for connections in the audio world and then we start to map what we're hearing are problems from customers with some of what we know. We can do extremely well on our end. And then try to connect those two things to come up with features that are using technology because it solves problems and saves time. So, it really has to map up to customer need. And we're pretty serious about that. All of my predecessors and all the notes they've left before me and the team that's here reflects this. There's a few people who have been on RX basi- cally since the start. So, there's a nice continuity of people there