The Broadband tab is really where the power of SS Pro resides. The number of controls may seem a bit daunting at first, but you must realize that if you got a slider or button for everything that's going on under the hood, you'd have over 1000 controls! Like most other broadband noise reduction solutions, you must find a section of audio that is just the noise that you want to take out, then loop that section and hit the Learn Noise button. SS Pro breaks up the audio spectrum into 512 bands and creates a noise print that can then be used to attenuate those frequencies in parts of your clip you want to keep. As for controls, SS Pro offers 12 sets of Threshold and Reduction sliders that manipulate the algorithm's 512 internal bands. Upon learning the noise, the software automatically creates basic settings for the threshold sliders that pretty much follows the contour of the noise print. This actually saves you about ten minutes per use vs. manually setting all of these by ear. By default, all 12 of each type of sliders are linked together so you can move the overall threshold of reduction up and down without moving each slider individually. Once you get used to the effects of these controls, you can unlink the sliders and get a little tweaky with each band to really home in on certain ranges of the noise. Attack and Release determine how quickly the NR responds to the dynamics of the material. SS Pro intelligently alters the amount of reduction based on how loud the material is. Think of it like a ratio or percentage relating to the material you wish to keep -- this process is calulated in realtime for each of the 512 bands! You can see why they didn't give us controls for each band!
The final stage of SS Pro is the Noise Gate. A gate is useful if you just can't get all of the noise out without negatively affecting the desired material, especially for dialogue and other clips of the spoken word. The controls are pretty typical for this type of process, but the extremely intuitive scrolling waveform display makes it so easy! This sort of falls under the "why didn't someone think of this before" category. The display basically shows you exactly where the threshold is (volume-wise) in relation to the content. You can easily see the volume of your desired audio and can therefore quickly set the threshold a bit below so that SS Pro will attenuate the gaps (say in a speech) by the amount you specify with the Reduction slider. The Attack and Release controls are key here, as well. Set the Attack short enough to where the noise doesn't "hang over" too far into a gap and yet long enough to where it doesn't sound "chopped up". If it is a bit choppy, try lessening the amount of reduction or lowering the threshold a bit.
