Review: SoundSoap

Reviewed By: Kirk Hiner

Review Computer: 867MHz G4, 640MB RAM, ATI RADEON 8500, Mac OS X v10.2.6

Review Date: July 10, 2003 (updated July 12, 2003)

Product: Audio noise reduction software

Developer: Bias, Inc.

Minimum Requirements: 400MHz G3 or G4, Mac OS X v10.2, 128MB RAM and 20MB hard disk space. Stand-alone mode requires QuickTime 6 player (included). Plug-in mode requires a compatible OS X VST host application

Mac OS Classic Compatible: No

Retail Price: $99.00 (introductory price)

Availability: Out now

There are three reasons why I'm not currently a famous rock star. First, I think tattoos on anyone other than sailors circa WWII just look goofy. Second, I lack a certain degree of talent, and third I'm frightened by audio technology. This probably stems from a few evenings spent in music stores back in high school. There were always these guys there, who probably lived there, who'd plug in guitars and basses and start ripping out some Led Zeppelin or Rush jams in an effort to impress...someone, I'm sure. They'd play with knobs and levers on soundboards, press countless pedals, and talk about decibels and compression, then hand me a bass and say "See how this one feels." They all felt the same to me, and everything I played ended up becoming "Another One Bites the Dust."

That, I could've dealt with. I like "Another One Bites the Dust." The audio technology, however, I couldn't. Too much to know. Too much to worry about. Too much to go wrong. I just wanted to play.

If only there'd been a SoundSoap at Metronome Music back in Mansfield, Ohio in the mid-80s. Of course, I wouldn't have trusted it. Even now as I installed the review unit, I didn't trust it. See, when you've evaluated and reviewed as much software as I have, you learn to never trust what's written on the back of the box. All software claims to make its function "easy." Easy 3D animation. Easy Perl programming. Easy cat cloning. No what? Precious few applications make their task easy. Easier, yes, but not easy.

SoundSoap, just so we're clear, makes audio noise reduction easy.

Before I explain how, let's take a look at why you would even need audio noise reduction. Whenever you record audio anywhere outside of a sound controlled booth, you're getting elements you don't want. On your camcorder, it can be wind or even the noise of the camera's motor. On your turntable, it could be the hum of a bad connection. On your cassettes, it could be tape hiss. It could be pretty much anything, from a dog barking to a FedEx truck driving by, and it can be very annoying. Well, it at least annoys me, and has ever since I first put my tape recorder against the TV's speaker to record the theme to Airwolf.

So, even if your methods are a bit more high tech than that, it's pretty much a given that your recordings have unwanted background noise. Undoubtedly, there are many high-end applications out there that can clean this up, and probably do so quite well. Also undoubtedly, people who have been trained for years to use these applications and techniques and will write to me to explain that SoundSoap can't match what they do, and offer staggeringly complex explanations as to why.

That's fine. Now, for the rest of us, SoundSoap is an astoundingly simple yet powerful program that'll greatly improve the quality of your projects, even if you didn't know they needed improvement.

It works like this. Let's say you're dubbing an old cassette onto your computer to burn a CD. The cassette has seen better days, and you're getting a fair amount of hiss. Having saved the audio file to your computer, open it up in SoundSoap. Select a few seconds of the file, preferably a piece with only the noise you want to have eliminated, and click the learn noise button. SoundSoap then...well...learns the noise and prepares to eliminate it from the recording. You can go ahead and apply the filter, but there's also some fine tuning that can be done. If you select "Noise Only" from the mode menu, SoundSoap will play through your audio file allowing you to hear only what is going to be eliminated. If you're hearing items in there that shouldn't be removed, you can manually adjust the amount of filtering to be applied by using the Noise Tuner and Noise Reduction knobs. SoundSoap will show you its recommended settings, then allow you to tweak them. Because the filter isn't applied until you tell it to be, you can play around until the file sounds good to you.

SoundSoap also allows you to listen to the audio file with the filter on and off so you can compare the two. A couple times, I could hear bits of some songs that were going to be filtered out...usually cymbals and some backing vocals. However, when comparing the audio file with the filter on and off, I couldn't discern a difference with these elements removed. If I could, a couple quick adjustments to the tuning knobs would often give me the results I wanted.

Is it really that simple? Yes, and it gets simpler. There are some other buttons in the interface that take care of common problems in one step. Preserve Voice is preset to the decibel range of the human voice. By clicking this button, you can quickly eliminate nearly all noises other than the human voice from your recordings. Likewise, Remove Hum eliminates the hum caused by electrical interference. 60Hz and 50Hz options are available for those using 120 VAC and 220 VAC electrical systems, respectively. And finally, there's the Remove Rumble button that'll eliminate noises at or below 40Hz.

For those who like to see what they hear, the Wash Window provides a graphical representation of what's being cut out. The left side shows the original signal, while the right side shows what you're doing to it. Blue is good, red is noise. This is all well and good, but I preferred to trust my ears here; the Wash Window looked to me like nothing more than an Atari 2600 game gone horribly awry...although one that still sounded good.

SoundSoap offers more power than this, though. Suppose your noise isn't constant, that its frequency and such change throughout the duration of the recording, whether from distance from the noise source or from multiple noise sources. In that case, when using SoundSoap as a VST plug-in within a host application, you can set separate target areas in your recording and adjust the noise filter separately for each target. Quite a bit more time consuming, yes, but just as easy. Keep in mind, though, that SoundSoap can be used this way in BIAS Peak, Sonic Foundry Sound Forge, Steinberg Cubase SX & Nuendo, and Adobe Premiere (and some others; check your application's manual to see about compatibility with VST plug-ins). With the exception of iMovie, if you're using any of these programs, you're probably used to spending extra time to achieve better results.

SoundSoap can also be used with Apple's Final Cut Pro and iMovie, albeit not as a VST plug-in. In iMovie, you have to extract the audio that needs to be cleaned up, then open that audio file directly in SoundSoap or in an audio editing program that supports VST plug-ins, such as the Peak products. You can apply your filters, then save the file back out to iMovie. Upon opening the project in iMovie, your changes will show up. With Final Cut Pro, the recommended method is to set up Peak DV (which is bundled with Final Cut Pro) as the dedicated external sample editor. You can then access SoundSoap from within Peak DV...but be warned: When editing the files in Peak DV in this manner, you're editing your original source files. It might be a good idea to find that "Save As" menu option.

Now, I can't rave about this program without pulling back a bit. The results here often aren't perfect. In some of my recordings, I ended up with somewhat hollow sounding files after applying the filters. Even then, however, the results sounded much better than the files did going in. SoundSoap wasn't designed to be the perfect audio cleaning application. It was designed to be quick and powerful, therefore appealing the novice and hobbiest who want better sounding files, and to the professional who wants to achieve great results in a short period of time.

I'm not a rock star. I still have no tattoos, I still can't play the bridge of "Tom Sawyer," and I still know little about the science of audio. When I listen to the music of other rock stars (or to my movies, for that matter), you can bet it's going to sound great, even if the source was a fifteen-year-old audio cassette. With a little SoundSoap, even Rock and Hyde's "Dirty Water" can sound clean again.

[an error occurred while processing this directive]

.