When iZotope discontinued Iris 2, it left a specific hole. Iris wasn’t the only spectral sampler, but it was the one that made the spectrogram itself the instrument — you selected regions of a sound’s time-frequency image the way you’d select regions of a photograph, and played what you’d carved out.
Dillon Bastan’s Iota II, released September 10, 2026 at $60, is the closest thing to a successor anyone has shipped. Bastan’s original Iota was a Max for Live device with a devoted following; Iota II leaves that ecosystem behind entirely.
Out of Max for Live
Iota II ships as VST3, AU, and LV2, plus a standalone application, running on macOS (native Apple Silicon and Intel), Linux, and Windows. That platform list is unusually complete for a one-person experimental instrument — Linux and LV2 in particular almost never appear — and it means the thing is no longer gated behind an Ableton Suite license. There’s a free trial.
Bastan describes it as “an experimental Photoshop for audio,” which is the right frame: the interface is an image editor whose canvas happens to make sound.
What’s actually in it
Six sample slots, each displayed as a spectrogram. Onto those you draw up to twelve playback “paths,” each with independent settings — freeform 2D sequences traced directly into the time-frequency plane rather than a start point and a loop length.
Each path runs through one of three algorithms: normal, spectral, or resynthesis, with granular or classic playback modes and a scrub option. Triggering is either conventional MIDI keyboard or an auto-emit mode with physics gravity attractors — you seed the canvas with attractors and let paths fall through the spectrum, which is where the instrument stops behaving like a sampler and starts behaving like a system you tend.
The effects are unglamorous and necessary: spectral and classic filters, delay, overdrive, sample-rate reduction, ring modulation. Modulation is deeper than the price suggests — two LFOs, two envelopes, two sequences, and MPE support.
Who it’s for
This is not a bread-and-butter sampler and doesn’t pretend to be. If you want to drop a piano multisample in and play it, nearly anything else is a better tool. Iota II is for the practice where the sample is raw material to be excavated — sound design, ambient and drone work, film and game texture, anyone whose sessions involve staring at a spectrogram wondering what’s hiding in the 4 kHz band.
Twelve independent paths across six sources, with attractors running, is a lot of simultaneous motion for $60 — and after three years of people asking what replaced Iris 2, there’s finally a real answer.