SpectraLayers officially comes in several versions. The term will be familiar to Photoshop users, and provides the same benefits here as there: the ability to organise and audition different edits and alterations without committing to a sequence of irreversible changes.

The distinctive selling point of SpectraLayers Pro is hinted at by its name: it employs the concept of 'layers' to allow non-destructive editing of audio.

The difference is, to a large extent, one of marketing: the programs are very similar in their basic functionality and appearance. While Izotope RX and Sequoia are described as repair and restoration tools, however, SpectraLayers Pro is being presented as more of a creative sound-manipulation program. The kind of processing technology required for spectral editing lends itself well to additional utility features such as noise reduction, which can be thrown in as a bonus: SpectraLayers Pro, like Izotope RX and Sequioa, provides a de-noiser. A spectral display allows individual sound elements to be identified, selected and manipulated visually, much as image material might be edited and corrected in a package like Photoshop. Spectral editing is usually presented in the context of audio repair and restoration: individual musical or sonic elements generally occupy distinct areas of the frequency range, so an editor that allows you to cut, copy and paste by frequency as well as time stands the best chance of being able to isolate sound components - in particular, unwanted ones - and remove them from a pre-mixed track without affecting anything else in the mix. SpectraLayers brings something new to the mix, as it were, in the form of layers, which we'll look at shortly. Spectral audio displays are nothing new, and neither, for that matter, is spectral editing: Izotope's RX and Magix's Sequoia provide a spectral editor, and the concept of using a frequency axis for audio selection crops up in consumer-level programs like Roland's R-Mix. The program represents audio using a multi-dimensional, spectral display, and allows it to be edited in both the time and the frequency domains. SpectraLayers Pro is a spectral audio editor published by Sony Creative Software but developed by Divide Frame, a small French company who retain its copyright. With some innovative concepts borrowed from photo-manipulation software, Sony aim to make spectral editing creative as well as useful.Īudio layers are shown in the spectral display in green, or in red if selected.

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