Sony SpectraLayers Pro 2.1 Build 32

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Sony SpectraLayers Pro 2 is an audio editor unlike any we’ve seen before. Rather than offering the familiar waveform view, it represents audio data by graphing its various frequency components over time, using colour intensity to convey volume.

This opens up new ways of processing sound. For example, it makes it incredibly easy to select a rectangular region and apply processing only to that frequency band within that duration. More interestingly, SpectraLayers Pro 2 also makes it possible to isolate and process individual sound sources within a mix.

Doing this involves selecting the audio data you want to work with and copying it to a new “layer” – hence the software’s name. For simple sounds, you can employ the Extract Frequency tool, which works like a magnetic lasso for audio, using volume and frequency data to track phrases within your mix.

The Extract Harmonics tool does much the same, but it also captures harmonics at appropriate multiples of the fundamental frequency, in order to convey the full timbre of a voice or musical instrument. Cleverly, you can choose to base your selection on the second or third harmonic of a sound, rather than the fundamental, which is useful if your mix is muddy.

Once you’ve got your desired audio data on a fresh layer, you can adjust and scale the time and frequency components, apply 32-bit VST effects, or simply send it to a more conventional audio editor for direct editing. You can also invert its phase, causing your captured elements to be silenced in the original file when the two layers are played simultaneously, or use it as a noiseprint, to subtract its frequencies from the original file as a whole.

This is the real party-trick of SpectraLayers Pro 2. One of Sony’s product demos shows the technique being used to completely remove a wailing police siren from an audio recording, with no audible detriment to the rest of the sound; frankly, it’s stunning. Such a clean effect would be impossible to achieve with a traditional wave editor, yet SpectraLayers Pro 2 does it in a few clicks.

However, when you set out to duplicate the effect for yourself, it quickly becomes clear why a police siren was chosen for the demonstration: it has a very simple harmonic signature, and cuts cleanly through the ambient noise. If you want to do something less neat – such as pulling out the bassline from a pop song, or cleaning up the sound of one person talking across another – extracting the precise harmonics you need from the onscreen frequency soup will demand a terrific amount of patience, especially at first, as you learn to recognise what different types of sound look like in SpectraLayers Pro 2.

The learning curve isn’t helped by the software’s tools and controls, either, which don’t always work intuitively. For example, to copy audio data to a new layer, you must click on the layer to “solo” it, then click on the data from the main waveform. Zooming and panning is slow and jerky, which is a big pain, since selecting a harmonic series lasting more than a few seconds tends to involve both. Although this is Sony’s second release of SpectraLayers, it still feels very immature compared to stablemates such as Sound Forge Pro 11 and Vegas Pro 12 Edit.

As we said at the outset, we’ve never seen an audio editor like SpectraLayers Pro 2, and its capabilities are revolutionary for certain jobs. Without a doubt, it deserves a place in the toolkit of every professional audio designer. It won’t work miracles, though, and the professional-grade price and unwelcoming interface make it difficult to recommend to the casual customer.

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spectralayerspro2.1.32.dmg
spectralayerspro2.1.32.exe


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