Reid Rosefelt

Thank you! This makes me feel much better about all the time I spent on this. I already found out that I made a big mistake about Synthesizer V. It seems that Eleanor Forte was released back in 2018, so Synth V has had English-language voices from the beginning. What's new is that there are a lot of other voices coming out. Oh well, I do say that I didn't know much about vocal synthesis until very recently.

My video is finally up! It's 57 minutes long, so I don't expect anybody will watch it all, but I've spent a lot of time on the Chapter Markers so people can just pick what they want to see. One Chapter is a brief comparison of Emvoice One and Synthesizer V, and there's a lot of stuff that I think will be relevant to anybody working with a virtual vocalist--like using your DAW (including any MIDI utilities you own) to create your melodies, putting your backing track in first, thoughts on legato and vibrato, and so on.

lt's currently over 50 minutes long. It's a complete video manual of Emvoice, plus all my opinions. I had it up on YouTube and was working on the chapter headings when I realized some vital stuff was missing. So I'm doing some new shooting today. It's a hassle, but the video will be a lot better. Should be up tomorrow. Too late for the sale.

Sounds great. Let me know when you post the results of your work with Solaris. I think we will see a lot more Synthesizer V voices coming out this year and it will be a game-changer. Who knows? I may even get it myself. Working with Emvoice has piqued my interest. In some ways, despite its advanced feature set, Synth V is actually easier to use than Emvoice. 😄 I'm working through the Super Bowl trying to get this video done and uploaded tomorrow. It's really not directed to you, because you already know how to use the program. On the other hand, some of the things I talk about would be useful to anybody using a virtual vocalist.

Totally true. The interface is not intuitive in a lot of ways. In most ways, I would say. In my video I will strongly advise people to create the melody for the first pass of their entire song in their DAW. I work as I always do, which is to play live and then edit. But people who can't play can just draw notes, or use whatever tools they have to create melodies. After that, there are a lot of things you can only do within Emvoice, like vibrato. But even with the second stage of editing, I go back and forth between the Emvoice editor and Cubase. If it's easier to make corrections and changes in Cubase, I do that. I use the Emvoice editor only when it's necessary or easier. Despite that, I believe that Emvoice is still simpler. There isn't that much to learn because it doesn't do much. It is also currently a lot cheaper. For me, Emvoice is the right choice, but I can understand how for many--if not most--the right choice is Synthesizer V. Even though I only have the Synth V demo, I try to lay out the plusses and minuses of both. It's great that I bought my copy of the Lucy voice and don't have to worry about the influence of the NFR. I'll say what I want. Back to editing!

The Thomas launch sale ends on February 14th. After that, all three will return to $99. I bought Lucy and will buy Jay now. I was thinking about it, but this gets me off the fence. I'm working on a video on Emvoice now. It includes a section on Emvoice vs Synthesizer V to help people decide which is best for them. I thought my video would be out by today, but now it looks more like Monday. Cubase and Voicemeeter! Arggggh! 🥵 I agree with much of what @locrian said. But you can break notes apart by holding down the alt key. Maybe he means two notes connected in a legato, where one word is two notes. He's true about that. But if you have a group of notes you can select any you want, hold down the alt key, and drag them away. but Emvoice is still best for me personally, for reasons I'll get into in my video. For one thing, I have zero interest in pushing the envelope on what a virtual voice can do. But if that's what you want, Synthesizer V is the future. But it is also much more expensive today with two voices for $120. It may be $150 for the Synthesizer V program and a voice, but if you want to get Eleanor Forte, Solaria, etc., then you are looking closer to $200. I had very specific ideas for how I would use Emvoice when I got it (similar to my "Betty" on my Betty Page video) but since I got it, it's become an inspiring tool for songwriting. But if I want a voice, I'll use mine or get somebody else. The Synth V free demo is amazing, but it comes with LE versions of voices--so you can't evaluate quality from them. Emvoice is the same voices as the pro ones, but only 8 notes. But anybody who is curious can download the excellent free demos of both of the instruments and see for themselves. Or watch my video. 😄

$299 if you have a single product (including a freebie) and $199 if you bought VV even a year ago (like me). After this intro price it's $499 for single product or $299 for an upgrade. 🤮 If it was $99 I would upgrade. I guess the smart play is to wait until VV 5 or later. I sat out three years of Arturia V Collection updates. Does UVI have sales on VV upgrades?

Ben's videos were all I needed. But I'm sure there will be numerous ones coming. I expect there will be something from our own @Simeon Amburgey But it really is a library where you can just load a preset and play. He's set it all up for you.

I installed this last night and wrote some music with it immediately. I still have work to do on it--including making a video--but it will be my next piece. So I guess I would call this inspiring. I do think that everybody is going to use it and we are going to recognize the presets for years to come in TV and movie scores. Spitfire is an awesome company, but they haven't come up with a concept as exciting as this in a long time. I also got a kick out of searching in NKS for 'O." Osterhouse Sounds. 😄 Is there a more imaginative developer working today? And he's so young. There's a lot to come.

FYI, on the UVI site, this sale ends 2/7, aka Monday.

I downloaded the Synthesizer V Studio free version and voices, but I can only get it to work as a standalone. The pro version definitely does work as a VST, but I can't make this work. But does anybody have SV Studio working as a VST? If so, where is the .dll? Thanks!

Based on the past, I don't think so. I've been watching this carefully for a long time and I've never seen a single library go into Komplete that wasn't originally released by NI. If it's not on the front page of the NI site when it comes out... But if it is on that page, there is 100% chance that it will be in one of the versions of Komplete 14. Of course, who knows about the future?

Did you buy this already, Fleer?

Glad that Ben is finally taking command of his creations. Also going Player and NKS is an advance. Also. If you lived across the street from him in twin cities, you had to pay in Pounds. Not today!

Absolutely delighted that Simeon Unified Darkstar, so that I don't have to. My "unified" Darkstar library is a hot mess and wouldn't make sense to anybody else. 😄

Cool, Simeon. I look forward to checking it out. Check out the link--it's from the Unify Forum.. Simeon has been on a tear, doing a LOT of Spitfire stuff. 😄 Did you have to get permission from Spitfire?

These discussions will go on forever. The reality is that years ago when I went into a New York design studio, it was 100% Macs. Everybody I knew who wasn't using Avid for film editing ran Final Cut on Macs. And musicians used Macs. I'm not knowledgable about special effects and gaming, but I expect it was similar. The PC market owned the office market. Apple competed by going aggressively for the creatives. The machines were beautiful and they worked tremendously better than the PCs of the day on creative apps. Windows software was shit; Mac OS worked like a dream. It was truly a joy to use after the frustration of the PC. No viruses! And you couldn't get the programs you wanted. Apple owned the creative market, and rightly so. As with New York real estate, everybody wants to live near artists or look like them. So you would also see banks of Macs in offices of all kinds. I think that over time, creatives have abandoned Apple, not because they suddenly thought the products weren't beautiful any more, but because they can get more bang for their buck out of a PC. Not everybody who wants to make art is rich--far from it. They don't need the fastest processor any more than they need a Lamborghini--they buy what they can afford, and try to get the best they can. Windows OS is fine nowadays. Totally does the job. Apple going after creatives with computers is ancient history. They make trillions now with a wide range of products. They have totally lost the battle for creatives to the PC. And that's why such a large amount of creative software is PC only--it's the market where the money is. The war is over and the PC won. Next. From my experience in the film industry, nearly all of the best independent films of the last few decades were made with regular computers, both PCs and Macs. The budgets on those kinds of films tend to be very, very low. It's not about processing power--it's about talent. And honestly, I think you could make Marvel movies without buying the latest things. Just because you can afford it doesn't mean you'd have to abandon the film without the latest processor. STAR WARS did pretty decent business. The exception is creative software on tablets which is still owned by Apple. If you want to play music on a tablet, most of the best stuff is iPad only. But Apple stuff is very beautiful and that's why they can charge a premium for it and people will happily pay for that beauty. It is truly art sitting in your studio and you can't put a price on that. I read that the stand for one of their new monitors was a thousand bucks. It must be a hell of a stand. You should sell tickets to let people look at it. I bought a great 4K Monitor for $600, stand and all. The image is way is way better than the Apple monitors I used to drool over years ago. But I admit, the stand is just a freaking stand. It holds the monitor up and that's good enough for me. I still have an old desktop Mac, the fourth Apple computer I bought. I spent what was a fortune for me at the time, and It sits unused on the floor because I can't get ten cents for it. You can't put current OS on it. Not worth selling and who knows? I may find a use for it because it is still a powerful computer with the old OS. Maybe I'll go in there and output some stems from an old Logic project. It's just lost all of its value unlike a PC of the same vintage that can easily run Windows 10. When there is a conversation about price between PC and Apple it is always about the most expensive thing you can buy. If you compare how much computer you can get (and the price of upgrading RAM, hard dive, etc) for a thousand bucks or less, there's nothing to talk about. The war is over. Which doesn't mean that these conversations won't go on forever, because reality is tribal. Everybody sees what they want to see, and finds ways to make facts fit into their beliefs. Human, too human...

I didn't need to get into the samples. In a nutshell, there are six controls to Haunted House (in addition to expression and mix that I used my modwheel and slider) They have weird names, but I mapped them by CC to the Unify knobs and assigned them names like reverb, delay, sample size, flanger instead of the screwball 0names in the interface (4 ETERNITY, REP 4 ME, R LUV BOO, MIST N FLEX, etc. ) I called them what they were. This way I could control all the settings at the same time and see how the six settings looked in Unify. There's a lot of other stuff I did with it involving patch labeling and sound design. I promise to do a video on it after the winners are announced. I just don't think it's good timing for me to say that I don't find the Spitfire player easy to use. 😄 But after I lose, I will do it. Glad you liked my entry. 😄 I like it too. If anybody's interested, here's the page with all the entries: https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/myhauntedhousescore

I didn't do the video. It was provided by Spitfire and the group Darkstar. There are hundreds of people scoring it. I just edited my original post to make this clear. That said, I have made a lot of videos.

The assignment in this scoring competition was to make music for a short film, "Haunted House," by the group Darkstar. https://www.spitfireaudio.com/haunted-house-scoring-competition/ All the sounds in this came from Spitfire Audio's $29 Darkstar Haunted House library, with the exception of the vocal, which is Bronte from the Evolution Series. I was going for a "Twin Peaks" vibe. This is also my second binaural mix, so please use headphones. I'm not crazy about Spitfire's player, so I loaded everything but Bronte in Unify. This made something that was very frustrating to use into smooth sailing.. I may do a video on how I set it all up, but I will wait until I officially lose this contest. 😄 This was good to do because there was a brief video I could use without being concerned with rights, plus the discipline of trying to do it all with one library. That was something I did before with the Evolution Series with my video NAIAD.

When I got this a month ago it came with three free preset packs--Particles, Graphite, and Glo. I just looked and now there is a fourth one, Breeze. They say they will keep doing this. These free preset packs are as good or better as the ones that other companies charge bux for. Like the paid Output presets, they only use the onboard sounds. So far, they have only one paid preset pack, Air, which comes with sounds of its own. It lists for $49. During the holidays there was a deal on Cube and Air for $115. I picked the package up at Time+Space when they had one of those 15% off sales. Just a tip for everybody, because Air is nice, and if this price came before, it will return, and maybe by then there will be a package with more than one paid preset packs. Cube is one of my very favorite purchases from 2021.

1) Because this site. or anything done by a computer. will NEVER come close to replacing what Larry does. It is just a supplement, like my Tiger the Frog post was every November. It's not going to be as comprehensive or accurate or timely. Larry doesn't scrape twice a day--he posts instantly. Anybody who has ever tried to post something before him knows what I'm talking about. 😀 There's never been anything wrong with having other sites out there, like @Batwaffel at Reddit, KVR, Rekkerd, Sample Library Review, etc. Who cares? Use them if you want. Or don't. 2) Getting things organized in categories and alphabetized is useful, as my TTF posts prove. Getting a ticker-tape of deals as they happen, has its advantages, but its disadvantages too. A list that sticks is simply different. 3) Having a history of prices would be very nice. It's the one reason why people go back to my TTF posts all year round--to find out what the Black Friday prices were. Imagine what a true history over many years would be like as you are contemplating whether a sales price is a good one. That would have been so helpful for me when I was starting out. 4) Larry doesn't really want to be paid. I have repeatedly sent him notes offering help showing him how to monetize this. Aside from asking for some "coffees" for the first time last year, he has a passion to do this free for the community. He sees all of us as family. That's who he is. And that's why he's irreplaceable. It's ridiculous to think that a bot can offer anything like that. We know him and we care about what he says. I ask you, "Can a bot be pissed off at IK?" 🤣I think not.

Thanks, Christian! This was the first time I've found a way to use Blue in an actual finished piece. ( I've used Realitone's Ladies.)To be honest, my main use up until this piece was to have Blue sing rude things to amuse me and my wife. Blue is so off my normal workflow that it was a sudden inspiration that came in late: "Why don't I see what Realitone Blue" can do for this?" She is not designed to sing any lyrics you want like a Vocaloid or Synthesizer V or Emvoice or anything like that. She can only make limited sounds. But Blue can sing "Beh" and Blue can sing "Tee" Those sounds are on the short list of what she is able to do. The issue is whether people hear that--some apparently do, some apparently don't. For me the issue is that she doesn't sound like a real singer. Close. As you say, I can get away with it because the video is about a Bettie. Or is realism an issue? Some "real singers" are so autotuned nowadays that they sound more machine-like than Blue does.

Really? Scraping the internet with bots? I'm not aware of any of them. I'm curious about this history. Everything I've seen so far has been collected by human hands, like Larry, @Batwaffel, Don Bodin, rekkerd, etc.

There's a guy who's in the process of building a website that will scrape some of the deal information off of the main music websites and assemble the deals in one place. It's sortable: by company, category, subcategory and discount. You can also click the words "grid list" at the top and see a different way of displaying the data. This is not the kind of thing that could ever put a dent in what Larry does. To start with, he's not looking to track everything. And secondly, the computer bot scraping the web doesn't know what it's scraping, so there may be ridiculous results unless it is moderated. But if it works, it will be a useful supplement to Larry, and a big competition for people who only list the main stuff. The cool thing about it --assuming it will work--is that it will track the history of music software deals. After a few years, it could be very useful https://musicsoftwaredeals.com/ Don't get hung up on whether it works perfectly or not. It seems like he just started putting it together recently and it currently is a work-in-progress to show how it may work. Although some of it already does work. He started a post in VI:Control to get suggestions from people about what they would like in a site like this. https://vi-control.net/community/threads/im-building-an-automated-platform-that-lists-all-music-software-deals-in-one-place-with-price-history.119796/ What do you think? If you have suggestions about it, now is the time to go to VI:Control and chime in.