It's a spectral filtering sampler basically. Spectral filtering as an effect has its own possibilities and apparently it sounds good in Iris and Iris can be played in real-time.

There's nothing exactly similar (like real-time) to Iris in the market, but there are numerous other software that do somewhat what Iris does: Metasynth, Audiosculpt, Spear, Alchemy. Technically these have a lot more features than Iris, but being real-time and being playable is unique to Iris.

From these Audiosculpt and especially Metasynth are the most extensive, but they aren't "playable". Spear is less extensive in features, but it's free. Alchemy has spectral filtering and good sampling features, but its spectral features are a lot clumsier, slow and rather difficult to utilize compared to Iris.

Iris has been finding it's way into more and more of my work in various ways. Aside from the musical and sound design strengths, I just used it to quickly create long even room tone from a very short clip of production audio for a spot i'm mixing. i was able to quickly filter and dial it to taste but still retain the matching ability to the room noise in the production dialog that is still present after standard dialog cleaning techniques. smooth like butter.

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For me, it's an excellent tool to create ambiences, sfx and melody but you can spend a lot of time !

If I have time on a production/video game, I can use Iris if not, I will use GRM Tools and other plugins...

I love iris. Ive been doing a lot of sound design with it lately. In fact I just did a bundle of scifi alarms with nothing but iris. Check it out!

https://getsoundeffects.com/#/products-page/sound-bundles/scifi-alarms/

There are a few other Iris threads here as well, might have some good info in them. I use it quite a bit, and am in the process of creating some instrument libraries for it right now.

It only does one thing, but it does it really well. It's far from perfect, but it's pretty darn good for a v1 of a product. Best thing to do is just download the demo, play around with it, feed some of your sounds into it, see if you like it.

Kind of impossible to say whether it's worth it or a waste of time, all depends on what you do and if you need it. Some people will get a lot of use out of it, others will have no use for it, like anything else.

Its interesting but I'm not much of a fan of its filtering to be honest, even at 96k it seems to have a tonality to it that doesn't appeal to my ears/sensibility... I've used Kyma, Metasynth and AudioSculpt and AudioSculpt seems the most transparent (although I'm sure if Kyma is capable if you make the considerable time investment required)