So I’ve just demod spectral layers pro and am quite impressed.
It denoises well and has other quite functional repair options.
Steinberg obviously know how to lure people in as I didn’t even know what spectral layers was until I upgraded to cubase 11 and discovered spectral one. And man now thinking about getting it.
Is it on par with Izotope rx repair software though. Anyone ABd the two. I have but am curious on other opinions.
The fact that spectral layers is built in is a huge plus for me. Even though it seems to take up to one minute or more to load it up, and that’s with a super fast Mac. (Is that normal for an 8 second audio clip ?)
There’s a big difference between the stripped-down SL One and the fully-fledged SL Pro. An apples-to-apples comparison would be SL Pro to RX 8 Standard or RX 8 Advanced.
I’ve used RX 6 Standard and RX 7 Elements. RX has the best declicking algos of any NR program I’ve ever used. I can’t imagine SL One competing in that department. It appears, though, that the ‘heal’ function in SL Pro offers a way to compensate for the RX advantage in declicking. But you’ll have to do more experimenting yourself to confirm this in your own mind.
Fortunately, there’s a dedicated declicker in SL Elements as well, and SL Elements is what I’ve been playing with for the last few months. According to the instruction manual, the declicker is identical to the one in SL Pro.
The SL declicker seems to do its job without leaving artifacts, which is a significant plus – no noticeable effects on transients, e.g., hand claps, snare hits. The problem is you can’t remove the really nasty, high-amplitude thumps with SL declicker that you can with RX declicker, even RX Elements declicker.
Nevertheless, SL Pro seems better equipped to deal with nasty thumps than SL Elements, because SL Pro has the manual ‘heal’ function that SL Elements doesn’t have. That should go a long way towards repairing real scars in a recording that you can’t do with the automated declicker.
RX and SL take different approaches to NR, and both of these approaches have their plusses and minusses. In case this matters, though, RX still doesn’t have ARA2 support.
drdrdrdr, is it the first time only, or opening a second short audio sample in the same project also leads to a minute loading it ?
What do you see during that mimute ? Is there a message somewhere ?
I see 3 scenarios:
-SL takes a long time to initialize, but then loading the audio file is very fast (possible, but SL only takes 5 seconds to initialize on my mac)
-SL initialize fast, but Cubase takes a long time preparing the audio file before transferring it to SL (possible, some users have reported some long time when Cubase prepares the data)
-SL initialize fast and Cubase prepare the file fast, but transferring it to SL takes a very long time (unlikely)
During that minute there’s just a spinning ball. It happens pretty much every time I start up spectral layers on a audio clip, even if it’s only a few seconds. (I’m on a 16 core mac pro)
I’m also finding that preview does not work. No sound. I’ve never got that to work ever so far.
There’s a bunch of other stuff that doesn’t seem to be working. I’m confused as clearly other people are using it fine without any issues. It’s just hit and miss for me.
Rx8 seems it has more to offer such as dedicated vst plugins for most of its processes (excluding unmix)
Also rx8 has a built in batch converter… Very very useful!
I own both… Currently sl7 pro is unusable (with c11 and ara) as anything I do bloats the .cpr file to eventually unusable/corrupt filesizes.
Rx8 is certainly more refined… Most processes work as a plugin… And the batch converter is a a major plus
I would rather stay within the Steinberg ecosphere… but the qa is sorely lacking
With rx8 I can batch process all the files I need… everything works fine
With sl7… using your ara implementation I get a corrupt .CPR file
Steinberg? Hello?
Luckily these were test projects!
My only advice coming from someone that has both…
Use rx8 and enjoy… You may need to batch process some tracks externaly…
If using spectral layer’s “pro” 7 be prepared for a bloated unusable corrupted CPR file
There are three versions of RX, Elements, Standard and ‘Advanced’ RX Adv. cost significantly more than SL Pro. I am not familiar with the differences between RX-8 Standard and SL Pro 7 which are in similar price range.
iZotope’s $1,200 price tag on RX10 Pro is comically ridiculous. RX10 Standard’s own $400 price tag is almost as ridiculous, but is on sale currently at $200. Still not much of a deal, compared to the $120 cross-grade to SL9 Pro from Adobe Audition (which, btw, has been providing almost all of the things most people do since at least 2012 when I purchased CS6). No brainer, really.
Many of the features in RX are also available in other programs. But it also depends on the quality of the repair. What I like about RX is that it offers many settings for difficult cases, but also gives good results with the standard settings.
Honestly the only thing that Izotope has over Spectralayers is that the company Izotope is a lot more committed to investing in their products overall and audio restoration/repair features as opposed to Steinberg.
Some of the best pieces of music I’ve heard so far (especially in the last 2 years) is eurorack patches and modular synth performances. The most interesting thing about eurorack patches is that its a once in a lifetime event, meaning that once you create a patch and unpatch it there is no way to recreate it, and even if you do manage to attempt to recall that patch it will never sound the same. The only way to archive eurorack patches and modular synth performances is to literally record it with a video camera or your phone… With that in mind, a unique useful feature steinberg could invest in for Spectralayers(which I have talked about before) is a “studio audio” feature. Where you can turn a phone recording into audio as if it were recorded in professional studio. Where a sum of algorithms of phone microphones can be used to build an algorithm (sort of similar to the unmix stems feature) to then be converted into “studio audio”. It would be good if I can take a eurorack performance that was recorded on a cell phone from 12 years ago, convert that into “studio audio” and then be able to unmix it.
So it’s little features like that where Izotope are willing to go above and beyond in investing into, whereas Steinberg seems to be a little more reserved. Someone here brought up a unique feature suggestion of “voice cloning”, which (as scary as it sounds) wouldn’t be a bad investment for Steinberg to invest into for Spectralayers. On the other hand I can see Izotope jumping on the opportunity of buying all the rights/patents to the “voice cloning” idea because they see how valuable something like that is for audio engineers.
And the most annoying thing about Izotope pricetag in my opinion is their upgrade price policy: if you upgrade to RX10 it doesn’t matter if you come from RX9 or RX2 price wise. I find this ridiculous and don’t spent one more cent on isotope products…
Practically no one pays MSRP for these products anymore, these days. When is RX ever not on sale? RX9 Standard was a $99 upgrade off of Elements for me, and it’s more often than not available for $149 either from iZotope themselves, or through partner retailers like Plugin Boutique. These sales are practically year-round.
MSRP simply isn’t a realistic measure of pricing, these days, unless the company in question [almost] never discounts their products (e.g. U-he, Image-Line, etc.).
RX Advanced is only worth it for post-production professionals. SpectraLayers Pro is most comparable to RX Standard.
Last year, iZotope had the Tonal Balance Bundle sales multiple times, where you could get Ozone 9/Neutron 3 Advanced, Tonal Balance Control 2 and Nectar 3 Plus (incl. Melodyne Essentials) for < $180 as an upgrade off of one of the many Ozone 9 Elements give-aways they had. Additionally, RX 9 Standard as an upgrade off Elements for $99. You could get almost everything for less than the “MSRP” of RX Standard (since VocalSynth, Neoverb, Insight 2, etc. all saw ridiculously low sales prices in the $25-50 Range).
If you’re buying these products are MSRP, you’re almost always throwing money away. You should view the MSRP of iZotope products no different than you view those from Waves and many other companies.
I would describe iZotope’s development-marketing strategy as selecting an acute, specific market need, be it one that existed for long time or a novel one, and then creating a specific “module” that will be added as a new RX feature and promoted as such in the next RX version released.
If the new feature is complex or required by professionals, then it’ll be part of the coming RX Advanced. If it is simple, just a workflow enhancement or if it was already included at previous RX Advanced versions, iZotope might release it at RX Standard new version to justify the upgrade price.
The question whether iZotope has achieved a good solution for the original “need” that the new module is named for (and claims to address) or not, needs to be verified at each occasion. Sometimes they do, however many times the launched module has required further updates or additional modules altogether. Iex Denoise, later required Debleed, Dewind, etc.
A relevant imho difference between iZotope and Spectralayers is that the former strives for one knob solution for each need, whereas SL aims for the provision of the best tools, finding complementarity in them at the optimal workspace for us users to solve the need, also including complex, algorithmic, AI assisted tools which have emphasis in automating solutions as well, but more out of the maturity of the process itself or specific customer demands.
Without forgetting that this nuanced approach gives us users more points of modification and thus more depth in the possibilities at hand.