zplane peel v1.0.0

Get creative with your audio recordings and samples. PEEL isolates individual instruments or vocals in stereo recordings so you can solo, mute or route the audio for external processing. Got a song where the vocals are too loud? PEEL can route the vocals to a separate track in your DAW [1] so you can set level and pan as if it was before mixdown. Do you have a drum loop where you wish the snare had a little reverb on it? No problem! PEEL can help you extract the snare only and add any effect you want to it.

zplane development has released Peel, a new spectral isolator EQ plugin that allows producers and musicians to get inside their audio recordings and isolate, mute or process single instruments or vocal performances from audio recordings.

Peel was inspired by the Focus EQ in zplane’s music learning software deCoda, a software tool that lets musicians learn new songs quickly. The Focus EQ helps musicians isolate the parts that they want to learn.

Tim Flohrer, CTO and co-owner at zplane, commented:

deCoda users really liked the Focus EQ and we started thinking we could develop it further for music production too. The ability to solo, mute and process instruments and vocals from existing audio recordings opens up for countless creative possibilities and we can’t wait to see what music producers will do with it.

Aside from isolating or muting sounds, Peel also has secondary outputs where the sound that’s been taken out of the mix is routed. This means producers can mute a vocal performance in a recording and route it to an audio track in their DAW for further processing: level, pan and effects without affecting the rest of the audio recording. Another example: isolate the snare from a drum loop and add reverb to the snare only.

Peel is also useful as a mix visualizer. Its spatial-frequency display will give a visual indication of many common problem areas in a mix.