WANTED: Spectral Editing Challenges

As I've mentioned before, I been using Samplitude Pro for most of my tracking/mixing work.  The latest update, V9.0, includes a "new" feature called Spectral Cleaning.  As far as I can tell, it's a step in the direction of the AA 1.5 Spectral Editing feature.  Only rectangular selections, just a few options for what to do with the selection, and very little control of how the spectral data is displayed.

A respected Samp forum member - a bit like the SteveG of the Samp forum - has said

with the due respect to the editing possibilities in AA, but SC (Spectral Cleaning) is certainly by far superior whan it coems to the removal of intermittend disturbances to what the spectral editing in AA offers.  SC is a specialised tool. It does what it does, and that very good.

Keep in mind that Englisch is not this fella's native tounge.
I'd like to put this claim to the test.  I'm not going to question this claim without anything to back it up, but I'm not going to believe it either.
I'd love to see some of your Spectral Editing challenges - short WAV files with examples of noises and such where SE has saved the day (with the problems intact, please).  I'll give them a run through with AA and then see what Samp can do with them.  I'll report back here with the results.

I'm slightly intrigued - if you can select an area the same way, or thereabouts, in Samplitude but only have a very restricted range of things that you can do to it (unlike in Audition, where you can pretty much do as you please to the selected section), what is it that it can do any differently, even, never mind better?

I'm not dissing Samplitude in the slightest - I'm just curious as to why somebody would make that claim against Audition when you have such open-ended options to play with, unless they were absolutely sure of what they were saying... unless...

That pretty much sums up my thoughts as well, but I need to do some testing before I make a claim one way or another.

I'm slightly intrigued - if you can select an area the same way, or thereabouts, in Samplitude but only have a very restricted range of things that you can do to it (unlike in Audition, where you can pretty much do as you please to the selected section), what is it that it can do any differently, even, never mind better?

This sounds a bit like WaveLab 6, which has a rectangular selection area, and two modes of using it.  

First, "Surgical", has a number of special functions to use for reducing the prominence of a sound:
- Damp
- Blur Peaks
- Dispersion
- Fade In and Out in various ways
You can vary the depth of the processing.
Or you can mark two areas and "Copy Exact" or "Copy Ambience".

Second, "Master", allows you to process the selected area through the master section, and hence any functions (including VSTs) you can plug in there.  You can chose to send the selected part through the master section, and the rest bypassed, or vice versa.

In both modes you can vary the slope of the filters defining the marked area.

I find the WaveLab system very good for reduction of noises, but there's no way I could have done the selective pitch change of a wrong note that I managed in Audition 1.5 though I guess it might be possible in the Master mode if I tried harder

Paul

In both modes you can vary the slope of the filters defining the marked area.

I must admit that I was wondering about this  - it's one of the very few options that Audition doesn't allow.

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I have been able to do an amazing amount of things with the Spectral Editing in 1.5.  I have not tried 2.0 yet for this as my main box is Win2000 and 2.0 just runs on my LapTop as as Direct to Disc recorder.  The main process I use when spectral editing is the click and pop tool, since it merges the freq information before and after the edit area.  Tedious but effective at removing things like strings buzzing against the frets (one buzz-click at a time), and of course string squeaks from slides (easier).  Also the sounds of a Guitar body rubbing against clothing, etc. etc.   If an artist takes a Taylor LKSM (Leo Kottke signature model) 12 string guitar and tunes it lower than normal they can get some impressive sounding buzzing (much to my chagrin).  In addition, if they wear just the right clothing they can also get some impressive sounding low "groans".     If I were at the recording session I would have fixed these problems at the source, but the original recordings were done at a somewhat famous  San Francisco recording studio back in 2001.

As far as sloped filters goes, there is the time varying filter tool, which I have used in spectral mode to "slide in and out" filters, but this is limited to that specific tool in Spectral mode (I guess).

I also guess that I can find some examples in the middle of this 300 hour part-time project I am doing (three years in the making so far), but it may be awhile before I can produce them.
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