Steinberg SpectraLayers Pro 12

SpectraLayers Pro 12 makes sophisticated spectral‑based complex audio editing tasks incredibly accessible to any level of user.

It’s only 12 months since the last version, but SpectraLayers Pro 12 has made some huge advances.

The world of spectral editing is on something of a roll, much of it driven by the integration of AI‑based algorithms into many of the typical processing and restoration tasks for which it is most often used. It’s perhaps not surprising, therefore, that this product category is seeing a pretty rapid upgrade cycle as manufactures try to keep up with — and ahead of — their competition. All of which perhaps explains why Steinberg have adopted an annual upgrade cycle for SpectraLayers Pro, and we now have version 12. So, just what’s new in the world of audio editing magic within SLP12?

How To Unbake A Cake

There is ‘new and improved’ scattered throughout the v12 update but, for many users, the highlights will be the further developments in SpectraLayer’s ability to do the audio equivalent of unbaking a cake. Four of the Unmix modules — Song, Drums, Noisy Speech and Transcription — plus the Voice DeNoise module get improvements in v12. For example, the Unmix Noisy Speech module, which separates an audio recording into ‘speech’ and ‘noise’ layers, generates noticeably cleaner results, making it easier to improve the intelligibility of a spoken voice in a post‑production setting, even when working with what might seem like potentially challenging source material.

From a music production perspective, it’s the Unmix Song and Unmix Drums modules that will attract the most attention. In testing both with a range of materials, the step up from v11 was very obvious. With Unmix Song, for example, the extracted vocal layer, which contains all the lead/backing/harmony vocals within the original mix, is obviously cleaner than with v11. Indeed, the quality of all the resulting layers is getting remarkably close to having a set of mix busses — drums, vocals, guitars, bass, piano, sax/brass and other — to work with, albeit with any effects associated with each instrument group already baked in. In use, the thing I found most remarkable was that, in the main, the majority of any remaining artefacts are focused on the effects elements of the original sounds (for example, sounds heavily processed by modulation effects); the fundamental sounds were generally dealt with very cleanly. This includes the drum and bass layers. Are they perfect? Well, no, but Steinberg have made significant steps forward here, particularly in terms of the cleanness of the drum transients (I’ll come back to transients later), while the bass appears much more solid. To my ears at least, SLP12 has now set a quality bar in terms of full song unmixing for others to match.

Many of SLP12’s existing modules have been improved, and new ones have also been added.

The Unmix...