What is SLP good for?

[Matthias_Adloff]

We have the expensive RX7 for all basic restoration tasks. Missing ARA still is bad, but it will come and until then, it get’s the work done even like this.

We have the free(!) ISSE for absolutely mind-blowing, quickest and very intuitive (but also limited) restoration/separation based on AI and/or machine learning. Better than all competitors for what is does. Stand-alone only, but who cares less when it comes to re-mastering or other well-paid tasks.

SLP is for what exactly?

Sorry guys, due to my love towards Steinberg I’m really trying hard to use this since day one in my daily business, but I don’t get it. Do I miss something despite using a paintbrush to create random sounds?

[suntower]

It’s a valid question and I’m waiting for the tutorials to help me answer it.

I can tell you that I bought it on a lark. I had -really- wanted PG to simply upgrade Wavelab’s Spectral Editor to match RX. I use Spectral Editing a -lot- for fixes but I always resent having to go into RX to do it.

-Ideally- I would like SL to be folded into WL… so that I can have its functionality without leaving WL.

-Ideally- I -never- want to leave WL. I keep hoping it gets more and more of RX’s restoration tools.

That said, I can see SL being very useful for creative (sound design).

[Matthias_Adloff]

@suntower: Thanks for chiming in. I was close to think that I’m the only one who has missed the point of SLP, which I also just bought out of curiosity.

Maybe some tutorials can enlighten many of us about what SLP is meant for. At the moment it just looks like an audio tool using a Photoshop workflow to me, which is a nothing more than a gimmick. Sound design… well, I can do much weirder and unheard stuff with ISSE already using a white noise as its input. The UI is more advanced in SLP, but far from RX or WL spectral stuff. For example, I had a job with lots noise restoration on a classical recording lately, and I tried to give my new toy (SLP) a chance. But I was unable to set the UI in a way that I could even find what was needed in time, where RX did it from almost the default setting.

[suntower]

Hi Matthias,

Somewhat O/T, but can you recommend a good tutorial for ISSE?

Thanks in advance,

—JC

[diode303]

For me, it’s overwhelmingly the Nuendo ARA 2 integration that sells it. Having said that, there are some rather nasty bugs that need fixing

If you don’t use an ARA 2 capable DAW and you already have WaveLab or RX (moreso), you may not find much new here. I do find the manipulation tools and the pure spectral editing experience in SLP to be a little nicer than RX, and quite a bit nicer than WaveLab.

I’m still using the RX plugin for denoising, as it does a much better job than SLP which is pretty poor by comparison.

I haven’t used ISSE, so can’t compare.

That’s about all I can comment on, as I’ve only been using it for about a week!

[MrSoundman]

… pretty much what diode303, although as a user since a few versions back I find the ARA integration nice to have, but not essential. For me it’s the selection tools, which I waited for WaveLab to acquire, but got tired waiting. I was very happy to then see SL come into the Steinberg fold, but not before I had also gotten RX. So, RX for denoising (and in RX7, separations using “Rebalance”), WaveLab for editing (sometimes with RX plugins) and SL for the real surgical stuff, the selection tools and the Photoshop-style paradigm.

[LoveGames]

All though the controls are simple, I’m finding the noise reduction to be quite usable and transparent even at %100.

[Matthias_Adloff]

@suntower

Hi Matthias,

Somewhat O/T, but can you recommend a good tutorial for ISSE?

Thanks in advance,

—JC

There is very little information about ISSE available, but as a starting point, watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKAX5pNPQp8&list=RDRd3prIkO5bg&index=3. The big difference with ISSE (and other tools that base on AI and/or ML, like some experiments with TensorFlow) in comparison to our standard tools like RX, WL or SLP is the fact that they don’t need surgical instructions from the user. When defining what you want to extract, just roughly mark the corresponding areas in both the time and the pitch domain in the spectrogram and see what happens.

One might say “hell, how can this be useful if I cannot clearly predict what will happen to my audio?!”. Good point, but I don’t care if it just works. Included with the ISSE download comes a speech file with a ringing cell phone. The ringtone covers two different frequencies that play quickly after each other, and they both show some harmonics. Try to remove this with RX, you will probably have no success. With ISSE, you end up with two files (speech and cell phone) that sound as if they were never mixed together

[suntower]

Thanks. I watched that video and I got slightly confused because there did not seem to be any ‘surgical instructions’. The guy whips through the selection process in an almost careless way. I figured it was just a crappy tutorial. But what you’re saying is that this is just how ISSE works. Maybe it’s my ‘engineering’ mind, but that strikes me as very counter-intuitive.

I’ll experiment.

Best.

—JC

@Matthias Adloff

@suntower

Hi Matthias,

Somewhat O/T, but can you recommend a good tutorial for ISSE?

Thanks in advance,

—JC

There is very little information about ISSE available, but as a starting point, watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKAX5pNPQp8&list=RDRd3prIkO5bg&index=3. The big difference with ISSE (and other tools that base on AI and/or ML, like some experiments with TensorFlow) in comparison to our standard tools like RX, WL or SLP is the fact that they don’t need surgical instructions from the user. When defining what you want to extract, just roughly mark the corresponding areas in both the time and the pitch domain in the spectrogram and see what happens.

One might say “hell, how can this be useful if I cannot clearly predict what will happen to my audio?!”. Good point, but I don’t care if it just works. Included with the ISSE download comes a speech file with a ringing cell phone. The ringtone covers two different frequencies that play quickly after each other, and they both show some harmonics. Try to remove this with RX, you will probably have no success. With ISSE, you end up with two files (speech and cell phone) that sound as if they were never mixed together

[LoveGames]

@suntower

Thanks. I watched that video and I got slightly confused because there did not seem to be any ‘surgical instructions’. The guy whips through the selection process in an almost careless way. I figured it was just a crappy tutorial. But what you’re saying is that this is just how ISSE works. Maybe it’s my ‘engineering’ mind, but that strikes me as very counter-intuitive.

I’ll experiment.

Best.

—JC

@Matthias Adloff

@suntower

Hi Matthias,

Somewhat O/T, but can you recommend a good tutorial for ISSE?

Thanks in advance,

—JC

There is very little information about ISSE available, but as a starting point, watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKAX5pNPQp8&list=RDRd3prIkO5bg&index=3. The big difference with ISSE (and other tools that base on AI and/or ML, like some experiments with TensorFlow) in comparison to our standard tools like RX, WL or SLP is the fact that they don’t need surgical instructions from the user. When defining what you want to extract, just roughly mark the corresponding areas in both the time and the pitch domain in the spectrogram and see what happens.

One might say “hell, how can this be useful if I cannot clearly predict what will happen to my audio?!”. Good point, but I don’t care if it just works. Included with the ISSE download comes a speech file with a ringing cell phone. The ringtone covers two different frequencies that play quickly after each other, and they both show some harmonics. Try to remove this with RX, you will probably have no success. With ISSE, you end up with two files (speech and cell phone) that sound as if they were never mixed together

1.) Know and setup the tool hotkeys to be quick for you
2.) Have all the increase/decrease brush size, ratio, etc hotkeys close together.

essentially just ride those size and intensity controls with your left hand while you work with your right.

There’s certain modifiers like alt is deselection, so thinking about using alt-deselecting to carve out more exact results after using the square selection tool or something.

like photoshop, clicking selection or eraser/brush tool on a spot, holding shift, and then clicking in another spot will create a straight line. you can quickly reduce a click with this method

[suntower]

This is helpful.

Anyone who has used Photoshop knows that the brush requires practice to become intuitive. After a while you can ‘guess’ how it’s going to work even though it does most of the work on its own.

Thanks.

—JC

@lovegames

@suntower

Thanks. I watched that video and I got slightly confused because there did not seem to be any ‘surgical instructions’. The guy whips through the selection process in an almost careless way. I figured it was just a crappy tutorial. But what you’re saying is that this is just how ISSE works. Maybe it’s my ‘engineering’ mind, but that strikes me as very counter-intuitive.

I’ll experiment.

Best.

—JC

@Matthias Adloff

There is very little information about ISSE available, but as a starting point, watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKAX5pNPQp8&list=RDRd3prIkO5bg&index=3. The big difference with ISSE (and other tools that base on AI and/or ML, like some experiments with TensorFlow) in comparison to our standard tools like RX, WL or SLP is the fact that they don’t need surgical instructions from the user. When defining what you want to extract, just roughly mark the corresponding areas in both the time and the pitch domain in the spectrogram and see what happens.

One might say “hell, how can this be useful if I cannot clearly predict what will happen to my audio?!”. Good point, but I don’t care if it just works. Included with the ISSE download comes a speech file with a ringing cell phone. The ringtone covers two different frequencies that play quickly after each other, and they both show some harmonics. Try to remove this with RX, you will probably have no success. With ISSE, you end up with two files (speech and cell phone) that sound as if they were never mixed together

1.) Know and setup the tool hotkeys to be quick for you
2.) Have all the increase/decrease brush size, ratio, etc hotkeys close together.

essentially just ride those size and intensity controls with your left hand while you work with your right.

There’s certain modifiers like alt is deselection, so thinking about using alt-deselecting to carve out more exact results after using the square selection tool or something.

like photoshop, clicking selection or eraser/brush tool on a spot, holding shift, and then clicking in another spot will create a straight line. you can quickly reduce a click with this method

[LoveGames]

Yes there are sweet spots with the hardness and ratio variables.

for instance if you have an ‘ess’ which usually shows up as a vertical band, make the size as large as the band, squeeze the ratio to be narrow horizontal, and then shift-click top to bottom, you can really sculpt 'ess’s this way.