It even works with pressure-sensitive graphics tablets.īy default, the FFT is viewed from above, so that it shows the frequency composition of the audio against a timeline, with amplitude represented by brightness. The difference is that with SpectraLayers you are painting with sound not colour, and your canvas is an audio FFT graph. The programme window also has a distinct image-editor look to it, with a toolbar down the left side, layer and history panels at the right and a large canvas area in the middle where you do the main editing work. These tools are used to select time and frequency ranges from within a sound and to then make modifications to them in any of the three audio domains: adjusting a selection’s pitch, increasing or decreasing its amplitude, and/or retiming a selection or moving it to another place in the audio altogether.

The similarity to image-editing software doesn’t end there, as the tools that you use to select, adjust and modify audio will be instantly recognisable to anybody who’s used software like Affinity Photo or Adobe Photoshop. SpectraLayers’ layers serve much the same purpose, but work with sound rather than pictures. SpectraLayers is built around the concept of layers (the clue’s in the name!) and this is borrowed directly from the world of photo- and image- editing software, where the user copies portions of an image, or imports new image content, to a new layer in order to make modifications that don’t destroy the original underlying material. SpectraLayers also comes with a standalone app that works independently of your DAW, and so doesn’t require the ARA2 support. This new version will run within any DAW that supports the ARA2 plug-in format, and has been designed to integrate particularly closely with Cubase and Nuendo, where it can replace the standard audio editor for audio parts assigned to the plug-in. The DAW pioneer has now released version 6 for Windows and macOS. Magix went on to release versions 4 and 5 of the software before the tech found yet another new home earlier this year with Steinberg. The SpectraLayers technology started life with Sony, which published version 1 in 2012, but it passed to Magix when it acquired the bulk of Sony’s media software a couple of years ago. This is precisely what Steinberg’s new SpectraLayers Pro 6 audio editor has been designed to do. The Holy Grail of audio editing, then, would be to work in all three domains simultaneously.

Steinberg spectralayers pro 6