Steinberg SpectraLayers Pro 13.0.20-All-in-One for macOS

SpectraLayers Pro is a spectral audio editor that treats a mix like a layered Photoshop file, where every sound lives at its own frequency and time address.

You don't just hear a snare bleed into a tom mic—you see it on a heat-map display, select it with a lasso, and pull it down. The AI unmixing pushes tracks into stems without the usual watery artifacts, which means a rough two-track mix can become something you can actually remix. The Voice Denoiser works the other way, lifting a spoken word out of air-conditioner hum without choking the top end. And Pattern Finder grabs a click or a chair squeak and hunts down every other instance in the file so you can silence them all in one pass. It integrates tightly with Cubase and Nuendo through ARA 2, so your edits follow the arrangement. Bottom line: it's surgical audio repair that doesn't sound surgical.

Removing glass, rumble, and unbalanced vocals from a live club take

Picture this: a live recording of a singer-songwriter in a small club. The performance is great, but the track has problems — a glass breaking during the second verse, some low-end rumble from a passing truck, and the vocal could use more air. Here's how it plays out in SpectraLayers.

I drag the stereo file in. The spectral display fills the window — a top-down heat map with frequency running vertical and time horizontal. I hit play once just to listen, watching the colors bloom. The glass break is obvious: a bright vertical spike around 3 to 8 kHz, lasting maybe a third of a second.

I zoom in with the scroll wheel, lasso the shard, and tap delete. The edit works in the spectral domain, so the ambience underneath stays intact — no hole in the recording, no mute button effect. That's the difference between cutting a waveform and cutting a spectrum.

Next, the truck rumble. It sits below 60 Hz, a long brown smear at the bottom of the display. I switch to the harmonics selection tool, click the fundamental, and SpectraLayers highlights all the related overtones up through the low mids. I pull the gain down 8 dB. The rumble softens, and the body of the acoustic guitar doesn't suffer.

For the vocal, I run the unmix vocal module. The algorithm thinks for about twenty seconds, then layers appear: voice, guitar, crowd noise, each on its own spectral layer. I solo the vocal layer, add a gentle high-shelf lift around 10 kHz, and the singer's breathiness surfaces without touching the guitar bleed. When I unsolo everything, the layers sum back together — same file, just smarter.

Before I call it done, I open Pattern Finder, highlight a single loud handclap from the crowd between songs, and set the threshold loose. It finds fourteen more. One click mutes them all to a polite pat. The whole fix takes less than ten minutes.

Opening audio directly from Cubase or Logic with ARA 2

SpectraLayers doesn't try to be a DAW, and that's a good thing. Most of the time it works as a companion to whatever you're already mixing in.

If you use Cubase or Nuendo, ARA 2 means you can open a clip in SpectraLayers right from the timeline. Make your spectral edits, close the window, and the audio updates in place — no bouncing, no exporting, no round-trip file management. The edits follow any arrangement changes, so if you nudge the clip later, the spectral work moves with it.

With other DAWs like Logic Pro or Ableton Live, the workflow is a little more old-school: export a stem, edit it standalone, import it back. Still painless, still worth the step. You can also run SpectraLayers as a standalone editor and send audio to it from any recording app via drag-and-drop or the system clipboard on macOS — the Finder and Quick Look integration is nothing fancy, but it works.

On the macOS side, it respects Retina displays natively, so the spectral display stays crisp when you're zoomed in tight. It runs on both Intel and Apple Silicon without complaint, and the disk cache handles long multitrack sessions without beachballing. If you use Audio Units plugins inside it for spot processing — say, a surgical EQ from another developer — the routing behaves like you'd expect on a Mac: straightforward, no driver headaches.

Why RX, Acoustica, and RipX pull in different directions

Three other spectral editors come up in conversation, and they each have a different angle.

iZotope RX is the name most people hear first. It's a repair suite built around modules — de-click, de-noise, de-clip — and it excels at batch processing and dialogue cleanup. Where SpectraLayers pulls ahead is in the direct-editing model: RX can show you a spectrogram, but you don't lasso and delete sounds on it the way you do here. For forensic-style repair on dialogue or a noisy podcast, RX is fast. For remixing a two-track or surgically reshaping a drum bleed, SpectraLayers gives you more hands-on control.

Adobe Audition has a spectral display editor built in, and it's fine for quick spot fixes — paint out a cough, reduce a sibilant phrase. But its AI separation tools aren't in the same league, and it doesn't do the multi-layer, stem-based workflow that SpectraLayers has built its reputation on. Audition feels like a wave editor with a spectral view bolted on; SpectraLayers feels like the spectral view is the editor.

Melodyne gets mentioned because it also messes with pitch and time on a note-by-note basis, and the blob display looks spectral. But Melodyne is a pitch correction and timing tool first. It doesn't give you a full-resolution spectral map, doesn't unmix stems, and won't help you find every squeaky kick drum pedal in a forty-minute live set. The two apps can coexist in a session — Melodyne for tuning a vocal, SpectraLayers for cleaning the bleed out of the overheads — but they're solving different problems.

Bottom line: SpectraLayers carves out its own territory by being a true spectral editor with AI separation that feeds back into a DAW timeline. The other tools overlap in spots, but none of them puts a full spectral Photoshop on your Mac desktop quite the way this one does.

Version 13.0.20 is a maintenance release. The installer notes cover the specifics if you need them, but in plain terms, it mostly irons out a few small bugs and keeps things running smoothly.

• macOS 12 or newer
• Runs on Intel and Apple Silicon Macs