Steinberg Spectralayers

[Dirtgrain]

How are people's experiences with this latest version?

[_al_]

Just discovered this app in last few weeks.
Is anyone able to tell me if it supports PDC?
For example, I cut some audio out, and paste it into another layer. Then I decide I want to apply a latency heavy VST to the layer I just cut out.
Will I be able to paste it back in to the original audio at the correct location? Or will the latency from the VST force me to have to realign the cut audio, before pasting back in?

[fairlyclose]

After testing the update version for about 30 minutes I must say that SL6 is now much snappier, less crash-prone, faster to work with, so it seems some major issues have been tackled.

Interesting - I bought SL4 a while ago and think it good but a bit slow and crash prone and missing some useful features eg export all layers. Development was slow although the developer was definitely resonsive. The update policy at Steinberg looks like I might as well wait for the next version or see if they have updates like "export all layers", but it is good the development seems to have picked up pace now

[Sampleconstruct]

After testing the update version for about 30 minutes I must say that SL6 is now much snappier, less crash-prone, faster to work with, so it seems some major issues have been tackled.

Interesting - I bought SL4 a while ago and think it good but a bit slow and crash prone and missing some useful features eg export all layers. Development was slow although the developer was definitely resonsive. The update policy at Steinberg looks like I might as well wait for the next version or see if they have updates like "export all layers", but it is good the development seems to have picked up pace now

I only bought into SL with version 6 so I have no comparison. My comment was related to the update from version 6.0 to 6.1, 6.0 was a disaster.

[BingBang]

I bought a License when it when it was 50% off. I had some trouble wrapping my head around how to use SL properly.

As far as I can tell, SL works like this:
The audio is loaded and then converted into a sparse representation using some transform. The sparse representation does not change regardless of how you adjust the display. The terms for the transform are mapped onto the display in terms of frequency and time. Then the user interface allows you to select terms of the transform to manipulate.

The part of SL that confused me is that the spectrogram that is displayed in the user interface is not of the stored terms of the transform of the active layers, I think that it is an STFT or similar of the resynthesized audio for the active layers. The spectrogram is then only a guide to help you select the terms of the transform to manipulate. In the YouTube demonstrations you see everyone tries to adjust the spectrogram so that the whole spectrogram it is as clear as possible. You don’t have to do this, and maybe it isn't always the best choice. The point of adjusting the spectrogram is to adjust the display so that it so that you can identify the regions of the screen that contain the terms that you are for example interested in altering or moving to a different layer.

Is this correct?

If this is correct, a feature that could be useful and might make the audio editing much easier to use would be to add thresholding of the displayed spectrogram. Right now you can select different color bars in the upper right of the display control. Then you can adjust the maximum and minimum for the particular color bar. The thresholding could have an additional slider so that if you are below a particular value the pixel’s value is displayed as the zero of the color bar.

Moving the lowest value of the color bar up wouldn’t be the same as thresholding. If you had thresholding, you could adjust the color bar so that the portion of the audio you are interested in is in the mid or high range of the color bar. Then you adjust the thresholding slider to make the noise components drop out of the image. The portion of the audio you are interested in would then very visible because it is in the mid or high range of the color bar. This could make regions easier to select manually or with an algorithm.

[Kalamata Kid]

Samplitude Pro X5 is due soon
viewtopic.php?f=7&t=543297
Some discussion how to get SL 6 and 7 economically.

[Kalamata Kid]

Perhaps Infinity might be worth considering.
https://hitnmix.com/infinity/
Version 4.5 just came out.

[Kalamata Kid]

From the Steinberg forum
https://www.steinberg.net/forums/viewto ... 5#p1014405

Timo's signiture:
Timo Wildenhain - Head of Business Unit
Professional Audio Unit
Steinberg Media Technologies GmbH

Hello,

SpectraLayers 7 is in the making and will be released this summer! It will probably be the biggest feature update
in the history of this product, containing various great new additions for Sound Design, Restoration, Editing etc.
More to come soon!

Thanks,
Timo

SL7 is a must have for me. I will put off updating to Melodyne 5 and see what SL7 has to offer.
My feeling is that I will prefer SL7 and so get Melodyne later whenever it goes on sale.

[WasteLand]

From the Steinberg forum
https://www.steinberg.net/forums/viewto ... 5#p1014405

Timo's signiture:
Timo Wildenhain - Head of Business Unit
Professional Audio Unit
Steinberg Media Technologies GmbH

Hello,

SpectraLayers 7 is in the making and will be released this summer! It will probably be the biggest feature update
in the history of this product, containing various great new additions for Sound Design, Restoration, Editing etc.
More to come soon!

Thanks,
Timo

SL7 is a must have for me. I will put off updating to Melodyne 5 and see what SL7 has to offer.
My feeling is that I will prefer SL7 and so get Melodyne later whenever it goes on sale.

i read this post, great news, but sometimes i think why not implement it in version 6... steinberg, perhaps not wavelab, has the tendency to implement things, that could be implemented in the versions that already exist... o well. somethings are indeed for a new version, others not.
o wel (again) i hope there will be nice update price for pro 6 owners. (and other other owners, and others, of course..)

we will see what the new features are!

[fairlyclose]

SL7 is a must have for me. I will put off updating to Melodyne 5 and see what SL7 has to offer.
My feeling is that I will prefer SL7 and so get Melodyne later whenever it goes on sale.

if SL7 solves the bugginess then it will be a nice sound design tool. I cant see why it is related to Melodyne tho - completely different beasts

[Kalamata Kid]

^^^
From my perspective I group them together for their ability to graphically manipulate an audio file. I prefer working directly on samples and surgically dissect and reconstruct them especially if they are long. If they are ARA capable that's even better.