Acoustica 8 drops the noise-profile step from DeNoise and DeHum

Acon Digital released Acoustica 8 on 10 September, and the change with the clearest effect on how the editor is used is in the restoration tools.

DeNoise 3 and DeHum 3 now run on machine learning models, and Acon Digital’s own framing of what that buys is the useful part: you can skip the noise-profile step entirely.

That step has been the shape of noise reduction for decades. Find a passage with the noise and nothing else, capture it as a profile, then subtract that profile from the whole file. It works, and it fails in the specific case where there is no clean passage to sample, which is most location recordings with talking over the top of everything.

A model that has learned what noise looks like does not need you to find an example in the file. Whether it does the job as well on any given recording is a separate question the announcement cannot answer, but the workflow change is real.

DeClick 3 and DeClip 3 get rebuilt interfaces. Extract:Dialogue reaches version 2.

The rest of it

The spectral editor picks up a Stereo View that shows stereo placement in colour on the spectrogram, so balance problems are visible rather than only audible, and an improved “select similar” behaviour.

Immersive support goes up to 9.1.6 channels including Dolby Atmos, in the Ultimate edition only. The interface gets a launch page, a dockable Processing Tools pane and a customisable toolbar.

The editions remain Standard, Premium and Ultimate, with the upper two also installing plug-ins for use inside a DAW. Acon Digital states there are no subscriptions and the licence is perpetual.

Producer’s note

If you have been putting off restoration work because the profile step made it slow, that is the part that changed, and it is worth retesting on the files you gave up on rather than the ones that already worked.

Keep the old method in reach anyway. A learned model is confident about what noise is, and on unusual material, wind, tape hiss with programme under it, a room with a tonal hum that is part of the performance, confidence is exactly the failure mode. A captured profile does what you tell it.