With the release of a new audio plugin on FX Factory called De-Clipper, we decided to compare our previous audio cleanup tools and see what came out on top.
De-Clipper ($59) by Accusonous is billed as “the world’s first entirely automatic De-Clipper.”
SoundSoap 5 ($150) by Antares is a suite of audio cleaning tools that includes denoise, declicking, and hum removal in addition to the declipper feature.
RX Elements ($129) by iZotope is a basic suite of audio cleaning tools, featuring de-click, de-clip, de-hum and de-noise.
We ran each tool over a couple samples of clipped audio in Final Cut Pro X, the results of which you can find here:
Overall, we found the RX Elements tool to be the most effective by a large margin. Further, within the interface of each tool, Accusonous’s De-Clipper and SoundSoap offer rather binary options. In SoundSoap, this is literally an on/off switch for the effect. RX Elements, meanwhile, offers more in the way of fine-tuning the various thresholds and gains. This flexibility is perhaps best demonstrated by comparing the interfaces for the various tools:
An important consideration is that while Accusonous’s De-Clipper is a standalone tool, both Soundsoap and RX Elements include a suite of other features and are thus priced accordingly. In particular, we’ve found the noise reduction abilities to be quite effective in both plug-ins and well worth the additional cost.
