I made a spectrogram editor plugin!
Hello audio engineers! A few months ago, I shared a web app I've been developing called SpectroDraw (https://spectrodraw.com/). I recently turned it into an audio plugin so you can use it in your DAW. It’s an audio editor that lets you draw directly on a spectrogram using tools like brushes, lines, rectangles, blur, eraser, amplification, and image overlays. Basically, you can draw sound!
For anyone unfamiliar with spectrograms, they’re a way of visualizing sound where time is on the X-axis and frequency is on the Y-axis. Brighter areas indicate stronger frequencies while darker areas are quieter ones. Compared to a typical waveform view, spectrograms make it much easier to identify things like individual notes, harmonics, and noise artifacts.
In SpectroDraw, the spectrogram uses both hue and brightness to represent sound. This is because of a key issue: To convert a sound to an image and back losslessly, you need to represent each frequency with a phase and magnitude. The "phase," or the signal's midline, controls the hue, while the "magnitude," or the wave's amplitude, controls the brightness.
You can use SpectroDraw to create glitch sounds, drums, alternate reality sound effects, and other sounds that cannot be made with traditional synths. You can also use the eraser or noise remover tool to restore samples. I made a free and Pro version of the web app, and I've recreated the free version as a VST Plugin so you can drag your samples directly into the playlist.
I’d love to hear your thoughts! Does this app seem interesting? Do you think a paintable spectrogram could be useful to you? How does this app compare to other spectrogram apps, like Photosounder?