Sonible prime:vocal — A Mix Product of the Week

New York, NY (January 2, 2025)—Over the last several years, Sonible has established itself as a leader in AI processing software for audio production. Its latest creation, prime:vocal, which functions as a standalone app or as an ARA plug-in in a compatible DAW, uses AI to clean up and enhance your vocals after the fact and is intended to make even poorly recorded ones sound professional.

After you load a vocal track into prime:vocal—either through the File Menu or by drag and drop—the software analyzes your vocal. The analysis happens in real-time, so if your vocal is 30 seconds long, it will take 30 seconds; if it’s 60, it will take 60, etc. When the analysis is complete, prime:vocal creates a suggested setting based on its analysis, using one of its five processors, all of which have control knobs and additional controls you can open with a button push.

The Noise Reduction processor removes steady-state noises like air conditioners or fans and one-shots like door slams or car horns. It also looks for other instruments that might have bled into the mic during recording and removes them. Meanwhile, the Room Reduction processor helps reduce adverse room acoustics that mar vocals recorded in untreated spaces. Elsewhere, the Frequency Weighting feature allows you to fine-tune the noise and room reduction. It lets you emphasize or deemphasize the low, mid or high frequencies in those reduction processes.

The next processor, Vocal Clean-Up, is targeted to reducing sibilance and plosives. For both the De-Essing section and the De-Plosive section, you can choose between bypass, Soft, Medium and Strong settings. The Spectral Balance section is designed to make the vocal sound tonally consistent. It features a selectable profile (Vocal Low, Vocal High, Speech Low and Speech High). The Color parameter lets you set Spectral Balance for Warm, Neutral or Bright coloration. After that comes the Dynamics processor, which offers several options for level-riding and compression.

Prime:vocal even has internal automation, which allows users to change the settings of the various processors over time. For the automation and the main display, each process has its own color code, which makes it easy to see, at a glance, what’s being affected.

Both the standalone and ARA-plug-in versions of prime:vocal have transport controls and allow loops to be set freely. You can bypass the plug-in or any components or listen to the difference (delta). The standalone application also has a full-featured export page that lets you rename, select sample rate, bit depth, bitrate, and even normalize to specific LUFS levels. Sonible is offering prime:vocal at an introductory price of $119 until January 20. After that date, the price will rise to $179.