Dillon Bastan released Iota II on 10 September 2026, and it is the rare instrument that makes MPE players rethink what they are actually controlling. Instead of notes on a keyboard triggering samples, Iota II hands you a spectrogram and lets you draw playback paths across it. The instrument is available now for $60 as a VST3, AU and LV2 plugin for macOS (Apple Silicon and Intel), Windows and Linux — a notable change from the original Iota, which lived inside Max for Live.

Most coverage has framed it as the spiritual successor to iZotope's discontinued Iris 2, and that is fair as far as it goes. But the comparison undersells what Bastan has built on top of the sample-as-canvas idea, and it misses the part that matters most to anyone playing a Seaboard, LinnStrument, Osmose or Continuum.

The Canvas Model

Iota II loads up to six samples, each with independent gain, tuning and BPM settings, and renders them onto a shared central canvas. You then place up to 12 independent playback Paths across that canvas. Each Path has its own playback settings, effects, physics behaviour, triggering rules and modulation routing.

The practical effect is that a single "patch" is closer to a small ensemble than a single voice. One Path might crawl slowly through the low end of a field recording while another skitters across the upper partials of a bowed string sample. Playback can be granular or spectral, which means the same source material can be read as a cloud of grains or resynthesised from its frequency content.

Then there is the physics engine. Paths can be animated by simulated forces rather than by a static LFO or sequencer, so the instrument generates motion on its own. This is the kind of feature that sounds like a gimmick in a feature list and turns out, in practice, to be the reason you keep the plugin open.

Where MPE Fits

Here is the detail worth pulling out of the spec sheet. Iota II includes a bipolar modulation system with two multi-wave LFOs (including a Perlin noise option), two looping envelopes, two path-following sequences, two random spray values, two macros — and MPE slide and pressure as assignable modulation sources.

That framing is different from "the plugin supports MPE," and the difference is instructive. In a conventional MPE synth, slide (CC74) and pressure are wired to a fixed destination by the instrument designer: pressure usually opens a filter or drives an amplitude, slide usually moves a timbre control. In Iota II, those two dimensions arrive as raw modulation sources that you route yourself, into the same matrix as the LFOs and envelopes.

So pressure can drive grain density on one Path and the spectral blur on another. Slide can sweep a Path's position across the canvas, meaning your finger's vertical movement literally moves the read head through the spectrum of the sample. That is a far more direct mapping between gesture and result than "pressure opens the filter."

The trade-off is that you have to build it. Out of the box, an MPE controller will not automatically feel expressive here the way it does in a purpose-built MPE synth. Nothing is mapped until you map it. For preset-driven players, that is friction. For sound designers, it is the entire point.

It is also worth being precise about scope: what has been documented is MPE slide and pressure as modulation sources. Per-note pitch bend behaviour across all 12 Paths is the thing to test yourself before committing, particularly if you play a continuous-surface controller like a Haken Continuum where pitch is expected to be fully free.

How It Compares Right Now

September 2026 has been unusually busy for expressive sample playback. Audiomodern's Soundbox shipped full MPE in its 1.3 update a day earlier, and Steinberg's HALion 7.5 added MPE support in August. Those are both conventional samplers doing MPE properly.

Iota II is a different proposition. It is not trying to be your orchestral or drum sampler. It is a texture instrument, and the MPE integration serves that goal — gesture as a way to sculpt an evolving sound rather than to articulate individual notes.

Worth Your Time?

At $60 with cross-platform support including Linux, the barrier is low. If your MPE playing already leans toward pads, drones and evolving textures rather than melodic lines, Iota II gives you two extra hands on a very unusual instrument.

If you mainly want an MPE sampler that behaves predictably with multi-sampled acoustic content, look at Soundbox or HALion first. Iota II rewards patience and a willingness to patch — which, for a lot of us, is exactly why we bought an expressive controller in the first place.

You can find Iota II on Dillon Bastan's site.