This is pretty far afield from the general mission of Preservation Sound dot com, but those of you who have been reading my writings for a while might be interested in checking out my advance review of some pretty interesting new audio software.
Regular readers might get the impression that I am a luddite who fetishes any/all things vintage and damaged, and you might be correct. But I am also a working producer and composer and I actually do give a shit about new audio technology that offers the potential for creating new sounds and new meanings.
My friends at Production Hub, a film/TV industry website, asked me to be one of the first people to review Sony Creative Software’s new product SpectraLayers Pro (disclaimer: I did work for SONYMUSIC for many years, but this had no bearing on the review selection; I don’t think the folks at Production Hub were even aware of my history there).
You can click here to read the review. If you work with digital audio editing on any kind of regular basis, I think you will find the software to be pretty remarkable, if even from a purely academic perspective. Elevator-pitch: what if you had a stereo mix of a rock track, and entire production with vocals, lots of parts all going on at once all the time, and there was an out-of-tune vocal note that you wanted to fix? Leaving everything else alone, just retune the vocal? Well… now you can. pretty easily actually.
Anyhow, lest my intentions here by lost: this is not a paid endorsement or sponsorship of any kind; it’s just not that often that I am impressed by something that I feel is truly ‘NEW’ in the world of audio production. Which might be why I am always digging around thru the past looking for ‘new’ ideas to bring to my work. I imagine that this sort of technology will show up in all DAWs in a matter of time, but for the moment, prepare to be surprised…
2 replies on “Interesting New Audio Software from SONY – SpectraLayers Pro”
With software like this, the evidentiary value of a recording is now absolutely zero. I think that will have big effects on the use of audio in court, just as Photoshop has changed how photos are used as evidence, unless it’s an image on film from the camera.
I also think it makes us have newfound respect for excellent old recordings, because back then there was no autotune. You did it right, and with the economics of the day, you did it in very few takes, unless you were Sinatra-no one else had the budget or the pull to spend a lot of time screwing around.
More like it will require judges to learn what the word checksum means.