I have been using Michael Norris' SoundMagic Spectral plugins recently and absolutely love them EXCEPT they are fairly prone to crashing in Mountain Lion it seems... does anybody know of an alternative suite of plugins that includes something similar to the Spectral Averaging plugin in SoundMagic Spectral?

To be honest, I'm not sure, but SpectrumWorx may be a solution for you.
Unfortunately it doesn't work with my host setup, but it may work for yours.
http://www.littleendian.com/

What DOES work very solidly for me are the Soundhack spectral plugins, but they don't have an averaging plugin like in the SoundMagic suite. Still, they're pretty brilliant.
http://www.soundhack.com/spectral-shapers/

I use Mountain Lion btw.

What makes spectral processing so great? Can someone take me to school on the spectral processing? Not to hijack the thread... Just really curious. Layman terms please.

i think the closest thing would be GRM Tools Evolution plugin. The bundle is quite expensive though.



Spectral domain processing gives you direct access to the spectral features of a sound, and lets you radically reshape, stretch or pitchshift it, or any combination of the three, and more. The internal representation of the sound is no longer that of a waveform like you know it from your audio editor (a time domain representation), but the audio is split up in frames of frequency data which is directly processed.

Have you tried this one for free?

dtblkfx

Have a nice day

Pity it doesn't have a gui on Mac

If you like Michael Norris' plugins, then you should check for these. Probably the most powerful & radical spectral processing plugins around at the moment:

SpectrumWorx
GRM Tools Spectral Transform
GRM Tools Evolution

Just demoing spectrumworx and wow, It is definitely very interesting! Impressive

Pretty cool little plug uh? I love it too. Nice wide range of effects too, from simple filter bandpass to impressive morphs.

https://soundcloud.com/vortex1-1/its-coming

I used the demo of spectrumworx to process this synth kick drum sound for this track. Spectrumworx is outstanding! I will definitely be buying this!


Also @ the OP you should check out the soundhack products!

They are very very good!

http://www.soundhack.com


Also if you are a ableton live user, definitely check out CSoundforlive as it has a few spectral based processors
Last edited by V0RT3X on Tue Jan 22, 2013 11:23 am; edited 1 time in total

Yep, Spectrumworx is exquisite (although I only have v1... will make the jump to v2 one of these days). Just wait until you start exploring the sidechain options and combining signals with it.

All sounds are essentially just a bunch of different frequencies happening at different times, right? A sine wave is the only sound which contains just one, pure frequency with absolutely no harmonics etc. Therefore, it stands to reason that any sound can be represented as a bunch of different sine waves! That's the essence of spectral processing. It has it's own set of problems though. The main one being the time/frequency accuracy trade-off (small windows catch quickly moving sounds like drum hits well, but can up mess up their frequency content, while large windows represent frequencies accurately but can 'smear' quickly moving sounds).

It's not always the right tool for the job, but it opens up a range interesting processes that simply can't be achieved by operating directly on the sample data in the waveform.

I remember trying spectrumworx once, but i wasn't impressed at all with the sound quality. It seemed to make everything dull and blurry that you feed into it. GRM has much better resynthesis.