Soundness release SoundSoap 5 and SoundSoap+
There’s a joke in there somewhere about soaping up curves, peaks and troughs but I can’t quite seem to find it. Anyway, SoundSoap is all about noise reduction and also has some stunning sound restoration capabilities. It can deal with the pops, clicks and crackle that gets picked up in every day instrument recording, but it can also remove background noise, fans, traffic and air conditioners with relative ease. SoundSoap 5 can analyse the audio and automatically tracks down the best place to learn the noise profile – you can of course manually adjust this if you wish. Other key advances in version 5 are that the hum removal algorithm has, say Soundness, been greatly improved, the media controls enhanced and they’ve added support for FLAC and MP3 files.
The interface and layout is wonderfully simple and easy to navigate, all big knobs and an refreshing lack of menus, with the graphical display confirming everything your ears are hearing. SoundSoap 5 is not solely directed at the audio engineer but also at the video maker where noise gathered by a camera’s microphone is probably a far more common problem. The ease of use certainly comes into play here; it’s really what makes SoundSoap stand out from other, perhaps more complex, solutions.
SoundSoap+ looks extremely similar but has “even more cleaning power” which in reality amounts to giving you complete control over all the parameters because you know what you’re doing. You can control the range of frequencies where noise reduction is being applied; use a downward expander to control low level noise; control tone with enhance and filtering tools; and deal with hum harmonics and set thresholds on how much reduction is being applied depending on the dynamic of the audio. SoundSoap+ has the same easy to use interface but with a few more knobs to play with.
Both work as a standalone application as well as AU, VST and AAX plug-ins for OSX and Windows.
SoundSoap 5 is available now for the odd price of 108.05 GBP / 141.53 EUR. SoundSoap+ costs 180.57 GBP / 236.51 EUR.
For more information: http://www.soundness-llc.com/