Significantly and noteworthy for Cubase and Nuendo DAWs users, SL6 integrates very tightly into your existing workflow. There is also integration with other audio editors, such as Steinberg's HALion and WaveLab.

SpectraLayers Pro 6 adds a new creative audio editing ability: now you may edit and modify recorded audio in the spectral domain. SL 6 graphically shows the time, amplitude, and frequency components of sound. You will have a (optional) three-dimensional view of sound and be able do editing that was heretofore impossible. This is the only visual transformation system that separates tracks, regions and clips into layers.

You may separate into layers these audio components and then cut/copy/paste these selections into containers or into other layers. Like Adobe's Photoshop®, there are 25 real-time editing tools to select frequencies and more within the display.

You may attenuate or amplify certain frequencies directly viewed on the display. Or use the eraser tool to remove or set the strength of a sibilant to 25%. It was easy to scroll through a vocal track and deal with this common problem and just as easy to redo or change something later.

A vocal recorded in a friend's closet had excessive low frequency rumble. Besides using the frequency selection tool to easily select frequencies below 50-Hz like a high-pass filter, there is the ability to "cut" or attenuate by a specific amounts at different frequencies. Extraneous noises that appeared in the middle of syllables were located, removed without affecting the vocal sound quailty.

Spectral Layers Pro 6 Box!

In addition, you may "register" a specific noise by "showing" SL6 a snippet of a sound, and then have it removed within a user definable tolerance. A similar process is possible for removing or reducing reverb.

Apart from doing microscopic audio restoration and repair, SL6's ability to deconstruct a sound by copying portions of the audio to layers to be manipulated has completely blown open the world of creative sound design.

A musical instrument was created out of that "closet vocal" by first removing the first harmonic and adding distortion and reverb. All of a sudden a cool sounding instrument played the melody up an octave from the vocal.

Two other spectral processors particularly useful are called Casting and Molding.

Casting causes the frequency content of the sound of one instrument to leave an "impression"--a deficit of that sound's frequency makeup on another instrument's sound. Casting is allied in purpose to somewhat like side chaining where you can change one track's dynamics with another's tracks impact. Like the EDM trick where the kick side-chained to the bass causes the bass instrument to dip a little in volume, casting works by removing only the frequencies of the bass instrument from the kick drum's audio.

Molding causes the frequency content of one sound to shape another. You may make amazing vocoder-like effects by using a vocal track to mold a poly synth just playing chords.

As of this release, there is a limitation with ARA 2 that makes using layers more complicated than it should be. For now, using the standalone version, running simultaneously with Nuendo, makes it easier to use Casting, Molding, or for the general layering of audio. For straight ahead editing without layers or casting/molding, using the ARA 2 version directly in the session is preferable although there are occasional audio sync issues. It is my understanding that this will be addressed with the ARA 2 update.

SpectraLayers Pro 6 is available through the Steinberg Online Shop for $399.99.