SoundSoap's technology isn't the only amazing thing—the price is too. 'SoundSoap lives up to its promise of powerful, yet easy-to-use noise reduction for records, videos, podcasts, and spoken-word recordings, as well as basic music-cleaning applications in your DAW. SoundSoap is an excellent value.' —Electronic Musician, Sept 2014. Download free fonts for Windows and Mac. Download fonts in categories such as calligraphy, handwriting, script, sans serif and more.
Most audio cleanup tools are intimidating in the extreme, with complex interfaces, packed with technical jargon. If you don't have a degree in sound engineering, you might prefer a simpler approach to repairing noisy audio - and SoundSoap 2 could be ideal.
Open an audio file, for instance, and there's no large waveform display, no talk of filters, spectral analysis or EQ. Instead SoundSoap opts for a few sliders, dials and buttons, which for the most part have clear and obvious labels like Noise Reduction, Remove Click & Crackle, Remove Hum, Remove Rumble and so on.
In many cases, though, you won't even have to use these options. Just click the 'Learn Noise' button and SoundSoap will figure out the noise in your audio, then apply the appropriate noise reduction settings entirely automatically. If this doesn't quite work for some reason then the results are easily tweaked; just drag the Click and Crackle slider, say, to apply extra cleaning power. And once you're done, the Enhance Slider replaces any missing high frequencies to leave you with a sparkling clean sound.
SoundSoap doesn't have the configurability of the more high-end audio repair tools, then, but there's more than enough cleanup power here for most purposes, and concentrating on the core basics only makes the program much easier to use (and cheaper, too). Conveniently, it's also available as a stand-alone PC and Mac application, and as Audio Units, RTAS/ AudioSuite and VST plug-ins, allowing you to use SoundSoap just about anywhere.
Please note, this 14-day trial version will fade your audio in and out periodically. You'll still have plenty of opportunity to hear how the repair tools affect your sound, but it won't be possible to save anything useful until you've purchased a SoundSoap licence.
Verdict:
It's not quite as powerful as some of the high end competition, but SoundSoap does have some quality audio cleanup tools, and it's also easy to use, so will have you repairing your noisy sound files with the absolute minimum of hassle.
At a Glance
Expert’s Rating
Cons
- Lacks audio enhancements
Our Verdict
Soundsoap 3
Although some people may claim that vinyl records bring a warmer quality to music, few contest the notion that dragging a needle repeatedly through a groove introduces unwelcome pops and crackles. Thankfully, many new tools have arrived that can zero in on this annoyance — and others — and largely eliminate it. One such tool is Bias’s SoundSoap, a $99 noise-reduction utility (available as a VST audio plug-in or as a stand-alone product) simple enough for a preschooler to operate.
Clean Up in a Jiffy
It really is that easy to use. To remove hiss and hum from a recording, you need only open a QuickTime-compatible video or audio file (including AVI, WAV, AIFF, MP3, and MPEG-4) and press the Learn Noise button. In a couple of seconds, SoundSoap profiles the noise in the file and removes its most annoying characteristics. SoundSoap allows you to focus on specific kinds of noises as well. Click on the Preserve Voice button, and SoundSoap removes audio clutter outside the range of the human voice. And clicking on the Remove Rumble button eliminates noise below 40Hz. Should you care to see what SoundSoap is doing, take a gander at the ovoid Wash Window, which offers a view of your sound before and after processing.
Soundsoap Free Mac Download
We successfully removed much of the background roar from a QuickTime movie shot near an airport runway. We also applied SoundSoap to a digit-ized 78-rpm recording featuring voice and big-band music. Although SoundSoap removed much of the hiss and crackle, the resulting file sounded a bit flat. We then wished that SoundSoap also let us enhance recordings with tone controls and a stereo-field enhancer, as does Arboretum Systems’ noise-reduction utility, the less-intuitive Ray Gun Pro X ($149; 800/700-7390, www.arboretum.com).
Macworld’s Buying Advice
Soundsoap Free Mac Software
There’s no question that SoundSoap ably and easily removes noise from just about any audio file you throw at it — and if that’s all you have to do, then this is the tool you need.
