There was a time when iZotope was the main game in town when it came to audio restoration. More recently we have seen some new players like Accusonus and Klevgrand. Now there is another player, Accentize, who, like iZotope, are using machine learning and AI. In this article, we see if DeRoom Pro and Voicegate from Accentize can measure up to the big boys.
What Accentize Say About DeRoom Pro
DeRoom Pro is a Machine-Learning based reverb removal audio plug-in built for professional use. An artificial neural network has been trained using many different room scenarios in order to be able to separate direct sound from reflection components. The real-time processing scheme provides instantaneous feedback while changing parameters and allows seamless integration into your workflow without having to switch applications.
You can choose between two different visualization modes to see how DeRoom Pro is affecting the signal. While the Waveform view shows the broadband energy, the Spectrogram view allows you to observe different frequency components.
The improved DeRoom Pro algorithm automatically estimates the optimal room-size settings. If you still want to select one of the previous room models (small, medium or large) you can deactivate the automatic mode.
In spectral focus mode, you can set all parameters for each of the three different frequency bands. This allows you to precisely shape the reverb suppression processing to keep the natural sound of your input signal.
For live applications In low latency mode, the overall latency has been reduced to roughly one-third of the original latency. This is useful for live applications where too much latency is an issue.
Specifications
Supported sample rates: 44.1kHz,48kHz,96kHz,192kHz
Supported channel layout: Mono/Stereo
Plugin formats: AAX, VST3, AU
Minimum System Requirements
Windows 7 (64-bit), 4 GB RAM, Dual-Core CPU 2GHz
Max OS X 10.12, 4 GB RAM, Dual-Core CPU 2GHz
An active internet connection is required for starting in Trial Mode (always) and activating (just once).
Compatible DAWs
Include Cubase, Nuendo, ProTools, Reaper, and Ableton
What Accentize Say About VoiceGate
VoiceGate is a Machine-Learning based audio plug-in, which can be used to reduce noise from speech and vocal recordings in real-time. An artificial neural network has been trained on more than 100 hours of audio data to learn the characteristics of human speech. The separate controls for steady and impulse noises provide parameters to tackle different kinds of noises without introducing many artefacts.
The underlying algorithm will be continuously improved. If you stumble upon some speech or noise data, which does not work as expected you can email the audio material to Accentize. They will include it in the training procedure and the next version will be improved further.
Efficient Computation Artificial Neural Networks are known to require lots of computational resources. However, the VoiceGate algorithm has been designed to run efficiently on average workstations in real-time!
Choose between different algorithms using the Algorithm Selector feature. In addition to the default algorithm, you can download updated algorithms to your machine and use the best processing option for every noise scenario you are dealing with.
Specifications
Supported sample rates: 44.1kHz,48kHz,96kHz,192kHz
Supported channel layout: Mono/Stereo
Plugin formats: AAX, VST3, AU
Minimum System Requirements
Windows 7 (64-bit), 4 GB RAM, Dual-Core CPU 2GHz
Max OS X 10.12, 4 GB RAM, Dual-Core CPU 2GHz
An active internet connection is required for starting in Trial Mode (always) and activating (just once).
Compatible DAWs
Include Cubase, Nuendo, ProTools, Reaper, and Ableton
What We Think About DeRoom Pro And VoiceGate From Accentize
It is only fair to say that when I learned of Accentize and their products, I was somewhat sceptical as to whether they measure up to iZotope, but I was pleasantly surprised, more of that later.
In preparing to test a product, one of the first things I do is to print out the manual. I prefer to read it off the page and it also enables me to mark up the paper manual with comments, thoughts and also highlight the features I want to cover. Unfortunately, Accentize has chosen to create their manuals with what effectively is black paper, presumably to match their plugins. This makes printing it, at best very expensive in ink, and at worst, hard to read. My workaround was to copy and paste the text out of the pdf manual into a TextEdit document and print it from there. When I raised this with Accentize, they acknowledged this was a good point and that they would change it in the future.
What I did like about the manual was the step-by-step How-to section. With a lot of plugins like this, it is important which controls you adjust in which order and what is the best starting point. The How-to section in both the DeRoom Pro and VoiceGate manual provided that starting point to work from and then to develop from by using the detailed guidance in the rest of the manual.
This enabled me to get good results quickly from the getgo, which also instils confidence in the plugin. Not all developers do this so top marks to Accentize for doing it and doing it well.
Accentize have worked hard to develop plugins that enable you to stay in the DAW, so you don’t need to ship the audio out to a standalone application when the going gets tough.
With both of the plugins, once I had got into the Spectral Focus section, which turns the plugin into a multiband version with 3 bands, looking at the display, the frequency axis is too linear for my taste. I would prefer a more logarithmic scale so I have more screen real estate for the very important mid-band frequencies. With the current, more linear scale, there is a lot of screen space taken up with the 2K to 10K range. Overall I would prefer 1kHz to be in the middle of the display.
That said, the Spectral Focus section is great to have in both plugins, however, I found that after having made some adjustments with Spectral Focus on and then, to help to simplify the display, I switched back to the normal display. All good, however, once I had made a change to any control in single-band mode, I lost the offsets that I had created in the multiband spectral focus mode. I would prefer that once there were offsets that they would be maintained once back in single-band mode. Currently, once you enable Spectral Focus, in either plugin and start using it in multi-band mode you have to stay in Spectral Focus mode to retain the offsets. This means if you want to make a small change to a parameter then you need to make an adjustment to all 3 controls and not just one.
When I queried this with Accentize they said… “The parameter reset of spectral focus is designed in that way since the idea is that you can first roughly tune the parameters using broadband and then start from there in spectral focus if you need to. This means changes in broadband always define the starting point for spectral focus. However, we will discuss this process internally again and try to get further user feedback”.
DeRoom Pro
With those issues covered let’s start with DeRoom Pro and see how well it performs. The quick answer is very well. It would be fair to say that it isn’t perfect, but I would say that of all the audio restoration tools.
This is especially true when it comes to dereverb plugins. In my experience, it is necessary to have more than one tool in your arsenal. This is because I have found that one tool does a better job on one audio example and another tool does a better job on a different audio example. I am pleased to report that DeRoom Pro will definitely be a part of my toolset for audio restoration work when I need to reduce reverb on audio clips.
Although Accentize makes it clear that DeRoom Pro is optimised for speech, I was very impressed by how well the plugin handled the roomy drum loop example I used in my video test and tutorial. One of the challenges for any dereverb tool is how well they can handle early reflections. Most can handle long reverb tails but not all can handle the early reflections of a small room. In my tests, DeRoom Pro handled itself well.
The Difference control is a very welcome option. it enables you to hear what the plugin is taking away, which helps you to be more aware that you are overcooking the process because you will be able to hear too much of the wanted audio in the difference output. It was also really helpful when in Spectral Focus mode.
VoiceGate
Moving onto VoiceGate, I went to some tricky audio examples in my black-box of audio nastiness, problems that there have only been solutions for relatively recently like mic rustle and wind noise. As you will hear in the video, VoiceGate handled both examples remarkably well. I did have to push the sensitivity control all the way up to get rid of the last vestiges of the unwanted audio, which left me with no wind or rustle but also no ambience, Voicegate had stripped the ambience away as well as the unwanted rustle and wind. That said, as I explain in the video my solution would be to track lay some appropriate clean ambience and that would also mask the low-level artefacts, from where the unwanted audio has been stripped away.
Voicegate has a neat feature buried away in the Settings window called the Algorithm Manager. With this, you can tweak the algorithm to suit a specific type of problem audio. There are some specialised algorithms that you can download including anti-wind, lavalier and anti-drums. I look forward to seeing more of these specialised algorithms for specific problems. It would be great to have an anti-music algorithm to help with music spill.
There you have it. Both DeRoom Pro and VoiceGate will stay on my machine and will be part of my audio restoration toolkit alongside iZotope RX. In fact, it will be installed on my laptop too because Accentize allows each purchase to be installed and licensed on 2 computers at the same time.
PROS
Easy to use and gets good results quickly.
Good How-to section in the manuals.
Love the different algorithm options on both plugins.
The Difference button makes removing only the unwanted sounds much easier.
You can work in real-time in the plugins, no need to go out to a standalone application
CONS
Losing the offsets created when using Spectral Focus, when disabling the multiple band option and then making another adjustment.
The law of the frequency response axis in both plugins needs to be more logarithmic with 1K in the centre of the display.
Price And Availability
DeRoom Pro is available now with a normal price of 210 Euros ex VAT
Until August 20th 2020 there is an introductory offer price of 157 Euros ex VAT - a 25% discount.
VoiceGate is available now priced at 134 Euros ex VAT
The Speech Restoration Bundle which is made up of DeRoom Pro and VoiceGate is available, with the special bundle price of 258 Euros ex VAT.
The Complete Bundle which includes all the Accentize plugins - DeRoom, DeRoomPro, VoiceGate, DialogueEnhance and PreTube is priced at 375 Euros ex VAT.