iZotope killed Iris 2 and never replaced it. For a certain kind of producer, the one who chops a vocal by looking at it instead of listening for the transient, that hole never closed. Dillon Bastan just filled it for the price of a pack of blanks.
## What Iota II is Released September 10, covered by Synth Anatomy. A visual spectral multi-sampler: load a sample, the plugin shows you the spectrogram, and you draw the route the playhead takes across it. Six sample slots, up to twelve paths, and each path can run a spectral, resynthesis, granular or scrub engine. You can also drop an image in and let it generate a spectrogram from the picture, which is the kind of feature that sounds like a gimmick until you hear a pad made out of a photo of your block.
## The rest of the box Three filter modes, delay, overdrive, sample-rate reduction, ring mod. Two LFOs and two looping envelopes. MPE support for expressive controllers. VST3, AU and LV2, Apple Silicon native, Windows and Linux. Standalone version included. Free trial. Sixty dollars.
## Why it's the gear beat The four gear stories this week were hardware: Elektron's outputs box, Akai's MPC One G2, Arturia's interface, the oZoe drum box. All good, all $400 and up. Iota II is the software answer for the producer who's one laptop deep. Spectral chopping is how you get the texture Vultures and the last few Earl records live in, the smeared vocal that's a chord and a voice at the same time. At $60 the question isn't whether it's worth it. It's whether you'll actually open it.
## One more for the calendar Oficina de Sonido's Clave, the Mexican 8-track drum machine with the Euclidean knob, opens its Kickstarter Thursday, September 17. Price still TBA; an early-bird tier is promised.
## Sources - Synth Anatomy, Sept. 10, 2026 — Dillon Bastan Iota II: if you miss iZotope Iris 2, you will love this visual multi-sampler workstation: https://synthanatomy.com/2026/09/dillon-bastan-iota-ii-if-you-miss-izotope-iris-2-you-will-love-this-visual-multi-sampler-workstation.html - Synth Anatomy, Sept. 10, 2026 — Oficina de Sonido Clave, a portable Euclidean drum machine: https://synthanatomy.com/2026/09/oficina-de-sonido-clave-a-portable-euclidean-drum-machine.html