I am an audio restoration engineer for a media preservation company and I have been a loyal Spectralayers customer since version 6. I use it mainly to clean up noise and hum from cassette tapes and audio reels. It has worked great for all these years. Now with version 13 the Noise Removal takes 7-8 times as long to do the same thing. A 2 minute noise removal is now 10-12 minutes. I have to run this 3-4 times on each track.
I’ve tried it on a high end amd system with high end nvidia gpu and a high end intel system with high end gpu and they both do the same thing. Take 7-8 times as long to process.
I talked to support and they say it’s just the way it is now, and theres nothing wrong with that. They offered refund and said they’re sorry I can just use the old version or deal with it.
I don’t think this is an acceptable answer. I would like real answers on how to fix this or a patch rollback, something. Can’t believe I’m even dealing with this. If it takes 7 times longer thats common sense that something is wrong and needs to be fixed.
Do NOT reply to this thread with anything except A FIX.
What module are you referring to in particular ? And what parameters do you use with this module ? Are you on Windows or macOS ?
Noise Removal i use strong 100 percent, to remove tape hiss and stuff like that. 1hr 24 bit 48k audio , 2min in 2 different pcs with spectralayers 12, almost 15 minutes on 2 pcs specralayers 13. Its the software, support confirmed they allowed that module thru quality check and dont care it takes 7 times as long.
There’s no module named “Noise Removal” in SpectraLayers 13. What module do you use ? Is that DeNoise ? Then there are more parameters than just the Reduction Ratio, hence why I need to know all parameters you use, since they have an influence on processing time.
Denoise, I use it on the same strength in both versions, strong 100%,
Yes, as you can see in your screenshots there are a lot more parameters now in SL13.
The Reduction Ratio doesn’t have any influence on the processing time, but the smoothing parameters sure have ! If you reduce those, it’ll process faster.
That being said, there’s likely an optimization that can be made here.
im testing on a 16bit wav file thats an hour long, on my 14900k intel machine with 5070ti. in SL 12 it takes 1:30 seconds, in 13 with stock settings it took 8 minutes, when I turned the horizontal and vertical smoothing down to 1 pixel it’s now 3 min. Much improved, thank you. Could maybe deal with it in exchange for the better denoise, but will have to put it into play monday when i get back in the office.
As of tues I have been using Spectralayers 13 with the smoothing turned all the way down and it still takes about 3 times as long as 12 but its tolerable enough to make the switch to 13, i wish there was a no smoothing option to get it back to 12 speed.
While not as severe, I’ve found a similar issue when Heal was upgraded to Reconstruct.
Yes, Reconstruct is much more flexible and yields better results, but it is also much slower, no matter the settings.
I had a specific use case with Heal, cleaning up the low/low-mids from simple amorphous amplitude variations, and Heal was practically instantaneous for that. It allowed me to blaze through it with Rectangular Selection. It consisted of a bunch of miniscule selections and processing
Now, with reconstruct, is takes a little longer to process each time, and the results for this case are not any better.
I know keeping legacy functions is not always easy and can complicate things from the developer’s perspective, but I still wish that whenever tools are updated in a way that makes them slower, we could keep the legacy version working, so we don’t lose some workflows like this.
The upcoming patch 3 will feature a big optimization of the DeNoise module.
I can have a look at Reconstruct as well to see if there’s some optimization that can be made.
I’d be happy with a checkbox that shuts all the extra stuff off. Theres time I will wanna use the new version, but not when im doing basic noise removal 4-5 times.
That would be amazing, can’t wait
That would be awesome, Robin, thanks a lot!
That would be great, provided we could assign key commands to the legacy version. 
