Hi
So I’m slightly considering to purchase SL with the 60% off voucher, but I’m not sure if it’s worth it for me.
The problem that I’m often facing is having a particular audio file with some dialogue, where there is some unwanted music or ambience in the background.
Is this easy to fix using SL, while still preserving a somewhat decent voice quality?
Yes, IMO it is the best tool available for this type of job.
But while it gives you the best results, it is not completely automated like other tools.
There is almost always some manual work involved, but the upside is that you don’t have to live with whatever artifacts the process generates, like you do with dxRevive, Dialogue Extract, etc.
You can run Unmix Noisy Speech on your material and then make a manual spot fixing pass for unparalleled results.
There is a free trial version. I recommend you test it first with your audio files.
So I have been using SpectraLayers for this very purpose a lot and you will probably still get some artefacting from the unmix process (all tools will) but with SL you can easily, quickly and effectively process the vocal layer to sort this out. This for me is the key difference, not only the ability to separate the vocals but then easily clean up artefacting from the process, it can even add missing information back with varying degrees of success but in the main with am amazing results.
@reticulatedpython How exactly are you removing those artifacts (or artefacting, not sure how this is spelled)? Which tools (or parameters) do you use for that?
My experience is that if it’s a recording of someone speaking clearly and it has subtle low volume ambience, then doing unmix soundtrack works almost perfectly.
But the moment the background music (or sound effects) is more prominent then the result of separating the elements (sounds) becomes unpredictable, which is understandable, but I’d still like to know if there is a way of polishing the final result and making separate sounds sound a bit more natural.
Usually what is done is that you then go into the noise layer and manually find and and move all the bits and pieces of dialog that mistakenly went there. Move them to a new layer so you have more freedom to manipulate those bits should you move unwanted stuff along with the good ones.
For this task a few selections and tools that come to mind are Transfer Tool, Frequency/harmonics Selection, Wand Selection, Lasso Selection and Cut Special (to new layer/last target).
You can use “sample all layers” so you can count on the Speech Layer to help keep your selections from wandering into unwanted stuff.
Frequency Repair is great for when the noise has completely masked the speech and you need to patch it up.
What pollutes the results are not exactly “artifacts” cause they are not new things that the process creates, but rather pieces of information that get to where you don’t want them to be.
EDIT: Oh, I talked about how to get stuff back, but not how to further clean the Speech Layer. For that, Reconstruct (former Heal), Attenuate and the good old Eraser (which you can think of as an ultra-precise EQ, both in Frequency and Time domains) are my usual suspects.
@henrique_staino has summed it all up pretty concisely, there are some very good tutorials on YouTube, one guy if I remember does voice work and has clear instructions for everything I think you are after.
Hope that helps.