Recording - November 2019 - 26

REVIEW

Steinberg SpectraLayers Pro 6
SpectraLayers Pro finds a forever home at Steinberg
REVIEW BY MIKE SCHEIBINGER

teinberg very cleverly calls
SpectraLayers Pro 6, 'The
Advanced Tool You Already
Know'. What this means, literally
(but unofficially of course) is that
'SpectraLayers is like Photoshop
for sound'. Just as Photoshop allows you to select and edit shapes
and colors in an image, SpectraLayers Pro 6 (SLP for short) allows
you to select and edit discrete
audio events and frequencies
in sound files. The workflow is
uncannily similar to Photoshop,
hence the comparison.

An Archetypal Workflow

As goes Photoshop, so goes SLP-
tools on the left, picture in the middle,
layers on the right-familiar indeed. At
first glance, SLP looks both minimalistic
and a tad mysterious. The image in the
middle is not the typical audio waveform
shape that we're accustomed to seeing,
but rather a fast Fourier transform (FFT)
display of the audio-a spectrum. Learning to read and understand the FFT display is easy; when properly focused,
sonic events in an audio file jump right
out at you. Once you have a handle on
where your targets live in the display,
you can move on to editing.
In SpectraLayers Pro, we choose tools
from an assortment that includes geometric shapes, freeform drawing tools,
and even 'magic wand'-type tools that
can seek and select specific audio content, such as isolated drum hits, all the
harmonics associated with a selected fundamental tone, and so on. Tooltip properties (size, depth, sensitivities, etc.) are
assigned in the top panel. It's possible
26 RECORDING November 2019

to make intensely specific selections on
the spectrum using these user-configured
tools. Once your target audio is selected, you can freely cut/copy/paste the
selections to new layers-again, think
Photoshop. The Layers Panel is essentially a mixing desk; layers can be soloed, muted, processed, and blended.
Here you can apply a range of built-in
SLP processes such as time and pitch
manipulation, noiseprint-based noise reduction, reverb removal, and more. You
can even do layers-level round-trip processing in other audio editors such as
Steinberg WaveLab, thus bringing your
plugin collection into play in new and
very highly creative ways.

Four Steps to Steinberg

2011: Robin Lobel, a young Parisian
film student and self-taught coder, revealed the prototype of his new invention, Spectral Layers (not a typo) under
his own Divide Frame brand. Sony took
notice almost immediately, and SpectraLayers Pro 1 was released by Sony
Creative Software (SCS for short) a year
later in July 2012. Full disclosure: I was
employed at SCS at the time, and I product managed SLP through version 3, released in January 2015.

Magix acquired SLP from Sony in
2016 (I went freelance at this juncture)
and released SLP 4 and 5. Steinberg
took over this year and released SpectraLayers Pro 6, and now here we are!

A New Alignment

Steinberg has reintroduced SLP to the
marketplace with a new look, upgrade
offers, and some great new features.
These include the 'Advanced Selection
System' that enables more complex and
subtle selections on the spectral display,
a new Move tool, additional mute and
solo functionality, improved Frequency
and Harmonic selection tool behavior,
and importantly, ARA Version 2 plugin
support, which takes SLP to another level
when used with Cubase Pro 10. This is
a major development, as we shall see.

The ARA Era

ARA (Audio Random Access) was
developed by Celemony and PreSonus
for tighter and significantly more fluid
realtime DAW integration with sophisticated audio editors such as Melodyne.
The general effect: ARA-facilitated systems blur the boundaries between audio
editing applications. The specific effect:
ARA allows SLP and Cubase to be so

Recording - November 2019

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