File under Where Are They Today?
I don’t actually remember there ever being an Iris 1, but I recall v2 coming out with much fanfare. It included a decent sample library across analogue synthesisers, acoustic instruments and Foley (some of which I still use with PadShop2). The samples were there to load into a spectral waveform display into which you could then paint or draw visible selections restricting the frequencies to tight clusters of sound.
This created a thin cluster of pitch, or islands of sound embedded in a sea of digital silence, or (with some work) up to four layers of superimposed precise sound montage. The signal then passed to a fairly standard ADSR filter and amplifier section with modular patching.
At first Iris2 seemed to offer a near miraculous range of creativity. But you would soon become annoyed trying to achieve musical results with drawing tools that just didn’t make sonic sense. For example you would soon want to draw a diagonal filter sweep. There were selection boxes, but they were straight X and Y – no diagonals. The paint brush worked but was fiddly, and you’d soon end up relying on the traditional filter to get that filter sweep, eventually just going to that filter as a matter of course.
It compared to U&I’s Metasynth… but that has tools that are primarily about designing sound and less about being Photoshop-lite. And Metasynth (as well as Alchemy) can add frequencies to build the sound – Iris could only remove frequencies with quite brutal scissors. I liked the idea but I never got a sound out of it I really loved.
This is probably why Iris tiptoed off stage soon after launch and has disappeared in the Native Instruments acquisition. A great pity, because it just needed a few more tweaks.