Products of Interest

Bias SoundSoap Pro Restoration Software

Bias is best known for its audio editing software Peak and Deck. Having introduced SoundSoap, a basic audio restoration/noise reduction software, Bias has now come out with a more full-featured utility, SoundSoap Pro. In a nutshell, SoundSoap Pro is an audio tool for cleaning up and "restoring" digital audio data, principally using three restoration tools:

Figure 1.

Screenshot of the Noise Gate window of Bias SoundSoap Pro.

BroadBand, Click & Crackle, and Hum & Rumble.

Hum & Rumble is used for reducing buzzing and hum from radio frequency interference (RFI), electromagnetic interference, and other sources, as well as low-frequency and sub-sonic rumble. Click & Crackle can be utilized to diminish highly transient impulse-like pops in situations such as vinyl record transfers. BroadBand may be applied to signals for tape hiss, wind, fluorescent lighting noise, and other continuous broadband noise suppression problems.

SoundSoap Pro comes with a realtime spectrogram, providing monitoring of spectral noise (see Figure 1). This can be helpful for visually locating problematic regions in an audio signal. A useful "Noise Only" button allows the user to monitor, on a global level, only what is being removed from the original signal.

SoundSoap Pro runs as a plug-in (AU, RTAS, or VST formats), and is compatible with Adobe, Bias, Cake-walk, Digidesign, Emagic, MOTU, Sonic Foundry, and other hosts. It runs on G4/G5 Macintosh desktop computers, or on Powerbooks (500 MHz or greater), Mac OSX 10.2 or higher. It is also compatible with Windows systems and requires Pentium III or higher (800MHz or greater), XP, working with RTAS, DirectX, and VST host applications. SoundSoap Pro requires a minimum 128 MB RAM, 20 MB hard disk space, and one free USB port.

The list price for SoundSoap Pro is US $599. Contact: Bias, Inc., 1370 Industrial Avenue, Suite A, Petaluma, California 94952, USA; telephone (+1) 707-782-1866; fax (+1) 707-782 1874; electronic mail sales@bias-inc.com; Web www.bias-inc.com/.

Ganymede Wave Corrector Audio Restoration Software

Ganymede Test and Measurement is a small UK company that specializes in consultancy services and software production for telecommunications transmission testing. The company has released the third version of its Wave Corrector audio restoration software, which is aimed at making quality digital audio CDs from analog recordings.

Wave Corrector offers a number of ways to repair old and damaged recordings, including noise, hiss, and click removal, using a range of audio and graphic tools to aid the user. The application features a number of views of the audio recording as part of its user interface. The main window is a color-coded oscilloscope-type display with separate colors for left and right channels, corrected waveforms, and detected clicks. An overview window presents a histogram view of the track or file being used, with markers to show clicks identified in the audio. The main window can also display a track-boundary view that can be used to adjust fade and silence settings between tracks (see Figure 2). The main interface also displays a list of click corrections that have been made to the audio file in question. These corrections are also color-coded according to the magnitude of each particular click.

Figure 2.

Screenshot of Track Boundary window in Ganymede Wave Corrector.

The application allows the user to record directly to a computer hard disk where the restoration functions are applied. The range of available functions for correcting recordings include click correction, filters for hiss, hum, and rumble removal, frequency response filters, and a graphic equalizer. Clicks can be automatically detected and concealed by analyzing the waveform on each side of the click and generating an appropriate waveform to replace the click. The process can be automatically carried out or users can manually edit individual clicks. Separate hiss and hum reduction filters use a noise subtraction technique that involves finding a profile of typical noise from the file and subtracting this from the audio file. The rumble filter is a high-pass filter with a cut-off frequency of 30Hz. Also included is...