It’s no secret that home-recording is on the rise, especially now. In response, there have been tons of plugins coming out that claim to be able to fix any issues with a bad recording and I’m always a bit skeptical, especially when they claim to be super easy to use.

When I heard about the Accusonus ERA 5 Bundle, I was intrigued even though I didn’t fully expect that it would work as promised, but as they say, “don’t knock it till you try it,” so try it I did.

There are 9 plugins that come with the Accusonus ERA 5 Bundle:

• Noise Remover

• Reverb Remover

• De-Clipper

• Plosive Remover

• De-Esser

• Voice Deepener

• Voice Auto-EQ

• Voice Leveler

• Audio Cleanup Assistant

Things Most of the Plugins Have in Common

I can definitely tell right away that ease-of-use is the number one goal with this bundle. Just about every plugin has a single processing knob to turn and a couple of settings to tweak with the push of a button. In addition to the usual bypass button, each plugin in the bundle has an on/off switch. These plugins are a bit heavy on the CPU so the on/off function is there to allow you to bypass the plugin and compare without throwing your track out of time. Double-click on any control to reset it to default.

When adding any Accusonus ERA 5 bundle plugin, they are listed under “Noise Reduction,” which confused me at first when I went to add a De-Esser. Other than that, the UI is pretty intuitive, but if you need a reminder on any function, you can turn on the info button and helpful hints pop up when you hover over a control. You can change the zoom of any plugin up to 200% if you need to. There is a waveform view at the bottom of the UI of most of the plugins that scrolls as you playback. The black waveform is always the unprocessed signal and the colorful parts are the processed signal. As you turn up the processing knob, more and more of the black waveform will transition to a color matching the plugin you’re using for a visual representation of the processing.

The Test Audio

A folk artist I work with did some home recordings and sent them to me to mix. The main problems were a bit of a background hiss, occasional plosives, some lyrics were getting lost under the guitar, muddy EQ, and some overly pronounced esses. In addition to our vocal and guitar tracks, we also have three saxophone tracks. These started in great shape, but I needed to test out De-Clipper so I routed one of the sax tracks to a new audio track, turned up the volume to make it clip, and recorded a new file to use for the test.

Noise Remover

I was expecting this to be a gate at first glance but that’s not at all how it works. It identifies the noise as the audio plays and reduces it in real time. You can choose the frequency band to focus on: All, Highs, Lows, Hi/Low, or Mids, or click on the sawtooth to target buzzing sounds. This example vocal has some hiss in the background that this plugin cleaned up seamlessly. Typically, the most transparent way I’ve encountered to de-noise something has been to sample the noise and remove it, but you need a couple of seconds of only the background noise in order to sample it. I get a lot of pre-edited files for mixing and sometimes there is not enough of the noise to sample so the fact that Noise Reducer doesn’t need a clean sample is a huge plus. I was pleasantly surprised with how well this plugin works and can see myself using it quite a bit in the future!

Plosive Remover

This is the first automatic plosive-removal plugin that I’ve encountered, other than just hitting it with an HPF set to around 90 hz. Plosive Remover worked very well and was super easy to use, just choose between normal or extreme modes. To me, it sounds like a multiband compressor (which I usually add on vocals anyway) just compressing the low end and still sounded clean when I turned the dial up all the way. I’d recommend using this as an AudioSuite plugin and only hitting the spots that need it to be CPU-friendly.

De-Clipper

Audition the two de-clip settings, and choose standard or high quality, and that’s it. No knobs to turn on this plugin and it just works. I used it as an AudioSuite plugin to clean up clips in a saxophone track and it couldn’t be easier. With an ultra distorted signal De-Clipper did give me that underwater sound you get when trying to save audio that is beyond repair, but that’s why the audio is “beyond repair.” If your recording has a clip here or there on loud notes, this will work really well to fix it up.

Reverb Remover

As with Noise Reducer, you can choose on which frequency band to focus. The output gain is linked with the Processing Knob automatically, but you can unlink it by clicking “auto.” I believe the vocal from the example was recorded in a cabin, so not a lot of reverb, but a little room sound on some of the louder notes. Normally, I wouldn’t treat a vocal like this with a reverb remover unless the reverb was a true problem, but I’m on a mission! To my ear, it cleaned up the small amount of reverb quite easily, as I would expect most de-reverbs would. I wanted to give it a challenge though so I also bounced a new vocal track with a reverb I added and tried to remove it. This worked well to remove the tail of the reverb but I could still detect it under the vocal, though it couldn’t be heard in the mix. When I cranked up the processing to about 90%, I could hear artefacts being introduced on esses and breaths but the reverb was as gone as it was going to be well below that threshold.

Noise Reduction

Voice Deepener

While I didn’t like Vocal Deepener on this particular mix, I can definitely see a use for it in thickening up thin-sounding vocals. Switching to punchy mode boosts some high frequencies as well as the low-mids to help diction cut through more, and normal mode is more mellow.

Voice Auto-EQ

As soon as you open this plugin, it starts listening for audio to EQ. After a few seconds, it gives you an EQ setting that you can tweak by moving the slider in the triangle to strike a balance between body, clairity, and air. You can adjust the intensity and the output gain as needed. I have to say, I really dislike not being able to choose what frequencies I’m EQ-ing and how, and for that reason I don’t see myself using this plugin much in the future. That being said, I can see a market for automatic EQ in content creators needing to turn around a bunch of content quickly.

Voice Leveler

Not exactly a compressor, Voice Leveler adds volume to quieter parts of the signal based on how much you turn up the processing knob. Breath control doesn’t remove breaths, but ignores them rather than make them louder, which is exactly what I would want. The Emphasis control evens out spectral differences between the on and off axis signal, although it’s not always the smoothest when turning on and off. There were a couple of times that I heard some artifacts being introduced when there were drastic changes in volume as the plugin processed the sudden change, but thought it sounded pretty natural otherwise.

De-Esser

This is kind of the opposite of Plosive Remover in that it targets the high frequencies instead. Both plugins have the DIFF button, which solos the band of frequencies you’re processing, and two processing modes. De-Esser has a Pro version which has a frequency control that you can adjust, but using the standard De-Esser on broad mode ended up doing the trick for this mix.

Tone Shaping

Before And After

Who Should Get this Accusonus ERA 5 Bundle?

Content creators who frequently put out podcasts, videos, or music who want to spend more time creating and less time mixing, should definitely consider the Accusonus ERA 5 Bundle.

If you’re looking for a fast and easy way to polish the sound of your content with good-sounding results, this’ll do the trick and pricing is less than $100 per plugin for the full Pro version. However, if you’re like me and want finer control over your plugins, you won’t love everything in this bundle, but it’s worth checking out for the noise removing plugins alone.

For full details on Accusonus ERA 5 Bundle, head over to their website.