Cedar Audio has announced Retouch 8, promising spectral editing that is faster and easier to use, able to cure a more extensive range of problems with two new capabilities – Match and Repair.
With events such as hi-hat spill in a multitrack recording generally removed by identifying each individually and then defining it manually prior to processing. But this is time consuming – frequently a very time consuming process – Retouch 8’s new Match facility allows one of the offending events to be marked for the machine learning algorithm to find all other instances within the recording. A threshold control allows its decision making to be biased toward including more or fewer possibilities to refine the level that includes everything undesirable but precludes events that seem similar but are actually wanted signal.
Having identified all of the matches, these are eliminated using the appropriate Retouch tool. These can be processed individually, with the operator authorising and applying the chosen tool to each, or all of the matches processed as a group.’
If you use spectral editing regularly, you already know the scenario – you mark a region and you want to suppress or eliminate a noise within it, but interpolation doesn’t work quite as well as you want, you can’t patch it, and if you attenuate the whole region you obtain a hole in the audio that generates an audible artefact,’ says Cedar Audio MD, Gordon Reid, of the Repair function. ‘What you need is a process that can suppress the event while leaving the background in the marked region untouched so that the resulting audio has no unwanted event and no change in the background signal and ambience.’
Repair uses artificial intelligence to achieve this goal. With the sound and some of the surrounding signal marked in the usual way, a single knob is used to suppress or completely eliminate it. Unlike other spectral editing tools, only the significant signal within the region is identified and processed; all low level signals as well as the ambience are left unaffected.
Alternatively, a clip may contain a quiet word or other understated sound that needs to be brought to the foreground. In this case, Repair is able to amplify the event while leaving the rest of the signal unaffected.
‘Cedar invented spectral editing, and we still hold the patents to it,’ Reid says. ‘Retouch 8 adds two remarkable new capabilities to the original and still the best spectral editor.’
More: www.cedaraudio.com
