Photosounder Black Friday Deal 2026: $29, 50% off

The Photosounder Black Friday deal takes 50% off, so it costs $29 until Nov 22, 2026.

Photosounder is an audio editor and synthesizer that treats every sound as an image. You edit the picture, and the sound changes with it. The maker calls it the first audio editor/synthesizer with an entirely image-based approach to sound creation and editing.

It is a standalone application, not a plugin, so it runs on its own rather than inside a DAW.

How does Photosounder work?

The analysis turns a sound into a spectrogram. You edit that image, and synthesis turns it back into audio. The maker says the processing is lossless, so a real recording can be transformed by transforming its image.

The spectrogram analysis works on a logarithmic scale natively. Time and frequency resolution can vary with frequency, which the maker says gives better clarity and better resynthesis.

Noise-based synthesis builds sounds from nothing, or resynthesises heavily transformed material with a continuous, smooth spectrum.

What tools does it include?

• Sprays that enhance, suppress, erase or create features, plus a harmonics modifier that applies a change to a frequency and its harmonics at once
• A Photoshop-style layer system with layer groups, blending modes and layer convolution modes
• Spectrogram operations from EQ, compression and denoising to envelope reversion, spectral gating, pitch inversion and spectral quantization
• BMP export and import, so you can process images in a third-party image editor
• Rhythm and note overlays for composing
• Scripting to automate actions

Every action is saved to a human-readable history file. You can restore a session after a crash, edit the history by hand, or save a project with its full history.

What can you do with it?

The maker lists a non-exhaustive set of uses:

• Turn a sound upside down, so bass becomes treble and the reverse
• Build soundscapes with extreme time-stretching
• Draw instruments and arrange them into a beat
• Subtract an instrumental from a song to isolate vocals
• Isolate or remove one instrument from a complex sound
• Create sounds from photographs or fractal images
• Vocode, pitch shift and denoise

Images are processed in 32-bit precision. Sound is processed and exported in 32-bit, with a 24-bit export option. It opens MP3, OGG, WAV, AIFF, FLAC and others, and exports 24-bit or 32-bit WAV, AIFF and FLAC.

It can process, play back and export at any sampling rate your sound card supports, up to 384 kHz. Multicore support is built in.

What does version 1.12.0 add?

The 1.12.0 update brings an Apple Silicon build, a "Rescale image" command and a dialog for setting the noise loop duration. You can also right-click knobs to set a value and restore the hardcoded analysis defaults with one button.

It fixes slow analysis of files of a certain length, a crash when turning on lossless mode and a dead zone on linear knobs.

Photosounder runs on Windows (XP and above) and Mac OS X Universal (10.9 and above, Intel and Apple Silicon). It can also run on Linux through Wine, and the maker recommends a powerful machine.