Ok dude whatever you say.
Best of luck in your search!
ba-bye
Mod note:
I have tried to remove the vitriolic posts from this topic, and to leave in place the posts specifically about Spectralayers. I apologize to anyone whose post was removed.
I am genuinely not sure what search you are referring to, but that is on you.
As a polite suggestion, perhaps in the future you could refrain from telling other professionals what to do.
We work in very different fields and are clearly never going to need the same tools or have the same experiences (given that the Windows version has had GPU rendering for years), so your suggestions aimed at me should really end here.
Take care.
interpolation (resynthesis) from left, right, up, down, horizontal and vertical is not new in spectral editors. I’ve been using those options for over 20 years in a competing product.
Dear Steinberg: If indeed SpectraLayers 13 HAS improved, then please PROVE this by creating demos that we can all watch on You Tube. Not just the short 5 minute demos for selected features. But real tutorials that show us, in depth, how a feature has been improved.
I have SpectraLayers 12, which I updated to without question when it became available last year. After one year, I have to say, I don’t use it at all. I do all my stem separation in Logic Pro, because IT WORKS, and SP12 does not work. Literally. I’m not exaggerating (I wish I was). Case in point, I recently used stem separation in a project. Project 1 had vocals, guitar, electric piano, bass, and saxophone and/or flute. Everything split into stems in Logic Pro perfectly. This didn’t work in SP12: even the sax did not split out as one would expect; only a few notes got extracted. But even the other instruments were very spotty, with some sections missing. Sure, I could spend hours cutting a pasting from one voce to another, but why?
(I also tried creating an Unmix Flute module by following the instructions within SP12 — but it did not work either.)
For Sound Repair, I still use RX9 Advanced from Izotope. Personally, I hate the upgrade prices that Izotope wants: $600 to upgrade is ridiculous! Now, perhaps SP12 (and SP13) can do the same repairs as RX (?) But it is hard to know whether this is true, because you can find many, many RX tutorials on You Tube; but almost nothing for SP.
Really, I am not a complainer normally, But I am simply asking: if SP13 is really an improvement, please make video demos of each feature and show me what has improved. And I mean, real tutorials, explaining how to do it.
Thanks for listening.
@ErnieMuse Apparently at the end of June/the beginning of August the demo version of SpectraLayers 13 will be available. I assume that the best idea is, to test it then by yourself.
I agree completely with what you said about the lack of training material on Spectralayers - and on Steinberg stuff in general. They really lack in this department compared to other companies.
Absolutely it can, and much more. But with a few caveats:
DeClick, Voice Declick and Unmix Multiple Voices modules are essentially broken, and have been since at least v9.
I find de DeReverb pretty weak, so I don’t use it.
Some FFT sizes still cause the GUI to get laggy when enough spectrum is visible on the X-axis.
ARA can be finnicky, but you can learn how to work with it.
There are bugs present, as people have reported here many times (myself included).
Now mind you, I only work with it inside Nuendo in ARA2 mode.
After years of using RX advanced in music, when I moved to Post I just couldn’t handle the hassle of working with it, for two reasons: RX Connect is terrible; and even if I used all of RX’s editor power, there was just so much stuff that I couldn’t clean up in an acceptable time frame. So I looked into Spectralayers, learned it, and never went back.
For me it works better than RX for mainly two reasons: one is the automated separation of audio in layers (mainly Unmix Noisy Speech) and the ability to work those layers in parallel. The other is the ability do adjust the FFT size with a key command. This makes its ability to restore audio (at least in a post-production environment) simply unmatched IMO.
For example, using RX there is no easy way to separate the voice from the background, for starters. It would be an extremely time-consuming, herculean endeavor, and with poor results. So while many modules there work very well, you are stuck with the “whole” audio the whole time. Any unwanted sounds that overlaps with what you want easily become an issue, cause there is no way you can work around everything manually.
Spectral and/or dynamic de-noisers have severe limitations, cause artifacts, lack control and deal poorly with random or periodic “events”.
Now with Spectralayers you can just separate dialog from background, quickly send any mistakes to their correct layer, and remove or attenuate whatever bothers you while keeping your rich, unique backgrounds (if that’s what you want), cleaning your dialogue perfectly (since you can constantly adjust the FFT size as your work, you can very quickly tackle even the most minute details, be it short or long, broad or narrow).
And I have seen this tested in real time a while back, when I supervised a TV series and the dialogue editors working with RX and real-time plugins simply couldn’t get rid of a LOT of stuff that I could clean up with SL very easily. I’d say “hey, you missed that at xx:xx:xx:xx:xx” (knowing that I absolutely could clean that with SL) and I’d get “oh, but that overlaps with word, is too broad, can’t clean it”. And these were editors with college degrees in cinema/audio and years of experience.
Why I’m not bothered by the caveats I pointed out:
Honestly, I have de-click modules already, I don’t really need another one. I have RX 10 declicker and Acon Digital declicker, and they take care of simple, generalized declicking jobs. Just I give it a pass after SL when needed.
They are not enough anyways, right? They work well with proper “clicks”, but if it is a ting, a scratch, a crumple, a crack, a ploc, a crash, or anything else that might excite the room, then you are toast. So they do their job, the spectral editor does its job. For detailed work the Transient selection + Reconstruct is the most transparent Declicker I’ve ever used.
De-reverb is the same. I already have de-reverbing tools that I prefer, so I use those for general de-reverbing.
Any particular more problematic passage will need special attention anyways, so when needed the other tools in SL are used.
The lag problem has improved tremendously to where it is almost a non issue, but I still hope Robin will fix it soon.
ARA is problematic, but all I need to do is: apply it, work on stuff, make permanent. That’s it. And that is MILES better than the old RX Connect days.
I think that is it.
For me the bottomline is: Even with all the problems, I find that Spectralayers allow me to work faster than the alternatives while delivering a superior result. It can do things in a way that no other software I know can, because of the SUM of its capabilities. Many times during work I just start laughing cause I was able to clean up something that I just cannot believe is possible. I very rarely have to comp room tone nowadays, or worry about audible loops, or whatever (I always hated comping room tone).
Speaking on a direct comparison between similar functions of RX and SL, I don’t think the results from the processing in RX are any better than in SL. And surely any marginal advantage RX could possibly have on specific processes quality is far surpassed by the undeliable workflow advantages SL has over it.
But that is for the SPECTRAL EDITING SIDE!!! (and my bias is towards Post-production)
I don’t use stem separation much, but from what people report here, there are (much) better alternatives. And I get it. We are in the AI age already, things like Stem Separation will always develop much faster than the lifecycle of Spectralayers is capable of keeping up with.
And to be honest I hope it keeps that direction. Stem separation in SL can save you in a pinch, but I hope Robin keeps focused on the Spectral Editing side, specially for post-production.
Man, these new modules are amazing. Reconstruct, Ambience Heal, Attenuate… are just such time-savers!
And let me add that no software is without bugs. A guy in this thread recommended Cedar Retouch, and I went to try it and it just refused to work at all. So…
Thanks for your comments. I realize now that I really don’t understand Spectralayers all that well. I’m going to go back to the internet and watch every tutorial I can find, even though there are not as many as I would like.
Feel free to PM me if you want, in a few weeks I’ll be less caught up in work and we can arrange a video call to go over some usecases and how I tackle them in SL.
This may be a good area for a group of volunteers to jump in!
I have also found lacking the documentation of the primary use cases for many of the modules. I suppose that some of this may be that those who actually use it are busy doing the work rather than donating time to tutorials.
Personally, I feel I would benefit from one or two actual use cases for how each module might be used in real-world projects. Additionally, some comparisons of how one module might excel at a task that seems more obvious for another module.
This begs the question of where a compilation of scenarios and their solutions would originate, as well as who has the knowledge and time to produce these tutorials.
Seems a good start might be:
- A collection of scenarios that users would like to (or have) tackled and demo of how the modules were used to solve the problem.
- For each existing module, provide a more detailed description of what scenarios that module was intended to address and how to accomplish the completion.
- Comparison between differing modules and how they might be used to tackle a task better than another module.
- Guidelines in how modules affected by FFT size and amplitude settings affect the end result.
It would probably be legit to say that those who routinely use spectral editing already have intuition about this and insufficient time or will to do demos.
Equally though, many of us that use SpectraLayers may benefit immensely by being introduced to demos of how to solve problems we have not considered.
I would like to make better use of the Unmix tools, as well as improvements. However, I must admit some limitations in implementation. For example, after completing an Unmix, I often get results where I can clearly HEAR guitar and keyboards ending up in the same stem. What I’m missing is the HOW of software reliably identifying the two and separating them.
So, rather than pile on more work for developers (and increased cost for the product), how might a group of volunteers identify and implement demos/tutorials. This would ideally not involve copyrighted material and begs the question of authorized use for demo purposes.
Ideas anyone?
Any good pointers to existing demos/tutorials than we may be unaware of?
Well, not in this thread!
I have a “Please wait a day between posts in this topic” instruction in bold at the bottom of this thread; so, I’m not going to post again to it. Maybe start a new thread on this topic? I certainly find there are very few, if any, instructional videos for SLP that I have seen which cover my approaches to working with SLP.
There are many, many posts on this forum covering what you ask for here…it’s just most of the advice is straight up text and not videos. I’d like to make some videos, but mine wouldn’t cover what you are asking for because the majority of work I do in SLP is manual selection for post prod of interviewing humans in French language.
