Sonible prime:vocal — A Mix Real-World Review

New York, NY (February 28, 2025)—Sonible’s newest release is designed to clean up and enhance vocal recordings. Unlike the company’s previous software products, which are real-time plug-ins, prime:vocal is a standalone application and an ARA plug-in. As of this writing, the ARA component is still in beta, but is available directly through the prime:vocal installer.

On its website, Sonible promises, “prime:vocal lets you achieve world-class, studio-quality vocals, regardless of your recording environment.” That may be overstating it a bit, but prime:vocal is undoubtedly a powerful tool for quickly and efficiently improving the quality of vocal recordings.

The application and the ARA component are functionally similar, except the former has an export feature. With either, the first step is for prime:vocal to analyze the vocal track. The process takes roughly as long as the track’s duration.

When the analysis is finished, prime:vocal creates a suggested setting using its five processors. These include Noise Reduction for background noise and bleed, Room Reduction to lessen the effect of room acoustics, Vocal Clean-Up for sibilance and plosives, Spectral Balance for tonal consistency, and Dynamics for gain riding and compression.

Each processor has a large knob controlling its amount. The Noise Reduction, Room Reduction and Vocal Clean-up knobs are color-coded green, pink and orange, respectively. After the analysis, you see the noise components overlaid on the original waveform display, in the color corresponding to their knob.

Each processor also has a Fine-Tuning section with additional controls. For example, Noise Reduction and Room Reduction have a multiband feature called Frequency Weighting, which emphasizes or reduces the processing in low-, medium-and high-frequency zones. Spectral Balance lets you choose vocal type and balancing style, and Dynamics offers various intensity levels.

Prime:vocal has its own automation, allowing you to change the amount of any processor over time. The automation lines, which appear below the main display, have color codes corresponding to the processors. One odd design choice: the Spectral Balance and Dynamics knobs are both gray and are indistinguishable in the automation area.

The standalone and ARA versions of prime:vocal feature transport controls and allow you to set loops freely. You can zoom horizontally and vertically and navigate using the zoomedout Track Overview Bar at the top of the screen. Global Bypass and Diff (Delta) buttons make before/after comparisons easy. An Export page supports renaming, selecting a sample rate, bit depth and bit rate, and normalizing to specific LUFS levels.

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I used prime:vocal on vocal recordings of varying quality, both sung and spoken. Some were recorded with studio mics and others with the mic on my iPhone. Some were close-miked; in others, the mic was several feet back. Prime:vocal improved them all. Not surprisingly, the lower the source quality, the more noticeable the improvement. The automatic settings were effective and typically required minimal tweaking. This was particularly true for the Noise and Room Reduction processes.

Using the Diff button, I could hear how much room tone and resonance those processors removed. Even on clean, studio-recorded tracks, prime:vocal typically found and reduced some resonance, subtly improving the sound.

The Vocal Clean-Up processor worked well, but I often had to turn it higher than the automatic setting to lessen plosives and sibilance sufficiently. The automatic Spectral Balance and Dynamics settings were generally quite usable.

Prime:vocal is another example of Sonible’s expertise in creating practical, AI-based audio production software. Not only does it improve sung vocals recorded in untreated spaces, it will also benefit producers of podcasts, videos and other spoken-word content where substandard audio quality is often unavoidable.

Once Sonible officially releases the ARA version—hopefully supporting most or all ARAcompliant DAWs—prime:vocal should have an even broader appeal. The standalone app works great, but the need to import and export audio from it may make it impractical for certain workflows.