Recording - June 2015 - 37

Say you recorded dialog in two different spaces with slightly
different ambience. Ambience match will gently superimpose the
sound of one and blend it with the other. Note that it works best
when using the more prominent ambience as your master, and
it will take a bit of trial, error, and finagling to get perfect.
The other way it works is when you have captured dialog on
location, or a professional speaker in a conference room, and
later you need to dub in some fixes, usually in a studio.
Ambience Match will take a print of the ambience from the
location on the original track. You can then export said ambience as an audio file, lay it under the dry studio recording, and
blend to taste.
Leveler
Again, this plug-in's name may be misleading at first-it's not a
peak limiter plug-in. It will take a spoken interview, recorded audio
from a play, or even multiple speakers in an auditorium, and
allows you to even out the minimum and maximum RMS levels to
put all of the dialog at a more even level. What's more, if you are
using the new Clip Gain function, it will draw the new adjusted
volume for you, and you can further tweak it manually.

Sonnox Fraunhofer

Pro-Codec V3
Batch processing and tagging complete
this exceptional codec software package
by Paul Vnuk Jr.

Back in November 2011 we took our first look at the
Fraunhofer Pro-Codec plug-in from Sonnox. Pro-Codec was created to provide the best-quality lossy conversion in both MP3
and AAC formats. I know the words "best" and "lossy" don't
necessarily go together in the audio world, but Pro-Codec
accomplished its task by giving users some of the deepest level
tweaking, the most options, and-thanks to a large detailed FFT
Display window-some the most detailed information of any
encoder on the market. It helps that Sonnox developed the plugin in tandem with the folks at the Fraunhofer Institute, who created the MPEG spec in the first place!
Pro-Codec also gives engineers and mastering houses the ability to audition finished songs and in-progress mixes though the
various encoding processes/codecs in real time, when placed on
the master bus of a multitrack DAW or 2-track editor. The benefit
of this is the ability to adjust levels to avoid digital clipping
induced by the encoding process, and to even try and tweak mix
elements to compensate for truncated frequencies in the song.
In Pro-Codec you can choose multiple codecs and encoding
levels like 128 kbps MP3, 96kbps HE-AAC, 256 kbps AAC,

Loudness
This can be similar to a peak limiter if you want it to be, but
it is really intended to focus on international broadcast standards and their governed volume levels. As such, it offers most
of the various weighted scales; as the RX 4 website states, you
adjust your True Peak and LKFS values, and once processed,
your 2-track audio files will be compliant with whatever broadcast standard you need.
Conclusions
Of course RX 4 Advanced goes far deeper than this
overview; it would take five times as much page space for me
to highlight everything. Just know that if your work includes professional podcasting, Internet or terrestrial radio broadcast,
commercials, film, video, books on tape, or other speech-centric
applications, most of the new features of RX 4 are aimed
squarely at you. Whether in audio restoration, archiving, forensic audio, or dialog cleanup, RX 4 is the Gold Standard.
Prices: RX 4, $349; RX 4 Advanced (as reviewed), $1199
More from: iZotope, www.izotope.com

and even Apple's iTunes+ (on the Mac version), and then do
A/B and ABX testing of all of them at once. Then, once you're
satisfied, you can capture and render them all to separate output files. The most important tool in the above process is an individual clip indicator, along with a level trim for each chosen
codec, so you can bring your track down to avoid clipping.
In the original version of Pro-Codec, once you had found the
best codecs for your track, you had two rendering options. One
was a realtime capture while the song played back in your DAW,
and the other involved dragging and dropping the 2-track files
from the DAW workspace into the central window of the plug-in
and rendering them. To be honest, both process were a tad cumbersome. I concluded my review by wishing aloud that Pro-Codec
would offer two additional features: a batch process mode to render a whole group of tracks at once, and the ability to tag files.
The Codec Toolbox
Two years later, in Recording's December 2013 Holiday Gift
Guide, we got a look at the baby brother of the Pro-Codec, the
Codec Toolbox. While Pro-Codec sells for $499, the Codec
Toolbox is $60 and still allows you to audition mixes through
various codecs in real time, albeit with a drastically simplified
interface. LED meters replaced the FFT display, you can only
audition one codec at a time, and there are no controls or trims.
What the Codec Toolbox did include was a new standalone
component that was more a traditional encoding program with
a full-fledged tagger. It also included a "Clip Safe" control that
could automatically trim your track down to avoid clipping. It
could also encode multiple files at a time... batch processing!
Unlike its big brother, it could only handle source files up to
24/48, rather than the 24/192 capabilities of the Pro version.
Over the last two years ,in my weekly work of editing audio
for podcast and Internet video, I found myself using the Codec
Toolbox over the full Pro-Codec 80% of the time, based solely on
its stand alone nature and simple, effective workflow. I even took
the extra steps of taking my hi-rez renders from my DAW and
sample rate converting them down in iZotope RX 4 (see facing
page) to 48 and 44.1k to work in the Codec Toolbox!
Pro-Codec Version 3
I was delighted to find that everything I love about Pro-Codec
and Codec Toolbox has now been fully integrated in Pro-Codec
V3. The standalone editor in version 3 is called the Pro-Codec
Manager; while visually and functionally similar to the Toolbox
in that it does batch processing, full tagging, and offers the Clip
Safe feature, it also adds more features.
RECORDING June 2015

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Recording - June 2015

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