Subject:Sony in the Dust!!

Posted by: Ekzpi

Date:8/6/2007 1:49:18 PM

For the second time this year Acid 6 Pro my favorite Daw since 1.0 has let me down big time this year. We are becoming out dated and no longer a full featured daw. Our competitors are leaving us behind, w/ updates and upgrades.

I recently purchased Melodyne 3 Studio w/ free plugin, and DAMMIT! Melodyne does not support because we lack certain timing features.

I bought the Faderport, and we STILL have yet to come up with a driver.

SONY YOU NEED TO WORK HARDER!!! We are being left behind. I hope AP7 really kicks ass, and doesnt just catch up. Because so far I think we are in last place.

Subject:RE: Sony in the Dust!!

Reply by: pwppch

Date:8/6/2007 3:02:24 PM

>>Melodyne does not support because we lack certain timing features

Can you be more specific?

Peter

Subject:RE: Sony in the Dust!!

Reply by: Ekzpi

Date:8/6/2007 9:37:09 PM

this came from one of the moderators at Celemony's forums.

"The plug-in has some time-based functions. However, some hosts do not support timeline information in their VST integration. You might want to contact Sony to see whether their VST standard meets our requirements."

Subject:RE: Sony in the Dust!!

Reply by: pwppch

Date:8/7/2007 7:53:15 AM

Which version of Melodyne are you using?

Peter

Subject:RE: Sony in the Dust!!

Reply by: Ekzpi

Date:8/7/2007 11:13:19 AM

I own Melodyne Studio 3, and have yet to upgrade to 3.2
I also own Melodyne Plug-in 1.2, which came packaged with the studio version.

Subject:RE: Sony in the Dust!!

Reply by: pwppch

Date:8/7/2007 6:13:22 PM

We are looking into it.

Can you give me an example of how you would use it in ACID? The more details the better.

Thanks
Peter

Subject:RE: Sony in the Dust!!

Reply by: Ekzpi

Date:8/8/2007 12:44:00 PM

Melodyne is a pitch and tune correction software. It can either work as a plug in or rewire. Although I think the plug in is more useful to me because I love acids workspace.

Heres a scenario:
Someone just recorded a verse that is out of tune. I would like to add the plug-in to the track and tune the vocals in a seperate window. Like any other plugin.

PCH, you would need to download a demo version of the plugin and use it another daw to fully understand its capabilities. I have yet to figure out its strengths because Acid is the only DAW i own.

Subject:RE: Sony in the Dust!!

Reply by: JohnnyRoy

Date:8/12/2007 7:36:55 AM

I have Melodyne Uno and while it is outstanding for stand-alone vocal tuning, I was really disappointed in it as a plug-in. It only supports Rewire which makes no sense to me as I don't want to play it as an instrument, I want to use it to pitch-shift loops on the fly like a VST would do.

What Melodyne Uno would be perfect for is modifying mono instrument loops in-line. For example, if you have a bass loop and you wanted to modify one or two notes in the pattern, you could simply slide them up or down the scale and be done with it. In ACID you have to chop the loop up, pitch shift the individual slices, and then render to a new loop if you want to just be able to paint it and not have to copy-n-paste all over the place. SONAR 4 has this capability built-in, I thought Melodyne Uno would add it to ACID but it doesn't. This would be an awesome feature for ACID 7.

~jr

Subject:RE: Sony in the Dust!!

Reply by: Kennymusicman

Date:8/12/2007 11:27:55 AM

I can't speak for uno, but the full version of melodyne has the "bridge" feature that lets you work more as you describe

Subject:RE: Sony in the Dust!!

Reply by: Ekzpi

Date:8/12/2007 12:52:20 PM

How did you get the "Bridge" feature to work????

ALSO,

PCH!!!!! Any results yet??

Subject:RE: Sony in the Dust!!

Reply by: Kennymusicman

Date:8/12/2007 3:12:01 PM

EEk..

I can't tell you = I have not got it on this system atm. I just installed the program on the other machine and (albeit in cubase) the bridge version was available. COuldn't tell you for sure if it was in Acid without looking which I will when I get the chance unless someone here can do so and check?

Subject:RE: Sony in the Dust!!

Reply by: pwppch

Date:8/12/2007 5:23:25 PM

Nope.

We are going to look into it.

No time frame.

Peter

Subject:RE: Sony in the Dust!!

Reply by: stuffedspacedog

Date:8/16/2007 6:52:30 AM

The Melodyne bridge works fine in Cubase, but not in Acid currently (at least not in my setup anyway), I believe this is for the same reasons that Acid won't allow FX Teleport to run remote vst plugins properly when rendering... all the timing is out.

Subject:RE: Sony in the Dust!!

Reply by: GES

Date:8/25/2007 9:41:27 PM

I agree -the product is like its SEEMS good in its abilities and specs, but just is not STABLE and reliable, fluent and speedy like others are, as well as old school complicated (non-intuitive) (Vegas and Sound Forge are Similar). Fixes are infrequent, etc....

It makes me sad cause i filed my teeth on Acid , SF and CDarc and have spent alot of money on it , which now i feel i shoulda just coughed up the extra for a Pro DAW. I hope they remedy this , i'd like to stay with it, i just wish it worked better.

SONY, please tweak out , debug, and soup up and stabilize (esp with Vst fx and VSTi's) Acid - its a good DAW, if it can just be these .

Subject:RE: Sony in the Dust!!

Reply by: coolout

Date:8/30/2007 12:42:45 AM

Silly question, but why would you need an additional app to hand-tune a vocal when you can just hit S on the keyboard, right-click the phrase and enter the pitch shift amount....all in Acid Pro.

If you have to keep tuning a vocal track it's probably time to record another take or find someone who can actually sing.

I don't see how those 2 seconds are such a chore.

If it's an instrument just copy and paste...highlight the phrase, hit ctrl-c, and hold down ctrl-v

Subject:RE: Sony in the Dust!!

Reply by: JohnnyRoy

Date:8/30/2007 8:12:02 AM

> Silly question, but why would you need an additional app to hand-tune a vocal when you can just hit S on the keyboard, right-click the phrase and enter the pitch shift amount....all in Acid Pro.

Not silly at all unless you’ve seen Melodyne Uno in action. ;-) Pitch shifting is just the start. Melodyne has a one button shifter that analyzes the notes and corrects all of them to the nearest note with a single click. You can even tell it not to be so exact so it doesn't sound too dead-on. That’s a whole afternoon of hitting the S and +/- keys in Acid for a long performance in one step. You can also shift by hand and "hear" the note while you're shifting just like if you were tuning a guitar! It also works with musical notes not numbers. (it can even show a musical staff with the notes that were sung or played) so it is more intuitive to use for a musician. But if it was just that I would agree with you it is silly. But Melodyne Uno is so much more:

What happens when you pitch shift too high or low? Why does it sound unnatural? Because the formants in your voice change as the pitch changes. Meloyone lets you edit the formants so that they sound more natural as you shift notes around.

What happens if someone is sliding up to a note and doesn’t hit it? Where do you split ‘S’ in ACID so that it doesn’t "jump" to the note but slides smoothly? With Melodyne it shows you the slide and when you change the pitch is changes the slide to match. You can even alter how fast or how slow the slide is to make it hit where you want.

What happens if someone sings (or plays) off tempo? You could chop up the performance in ACID and slide it around on the timeline but that is very tedious. With Melodyne, you can quantize Audio just like MIDI. So if someone is a bit off time you can correct that with one click. You can make notes hold longer and even change their amplitude to change inflections. All of this is accomplished by dragging musical notes on the screen, not by working with wave forms and trying to determine where to split.

Melodyne Uno only does one thing, but it does it very well. It is so far beyond pitch shifting that it’s hard to really explain it well without showing you the interface and how musical it is to work with. If you think you might need a tool like this, I would strongly recommend that you download the demo and go through the tutorial that is included. You’ll see that Uno is like a fine surgical tool for altering pitch, duration, formants, and amplitude in a very natural and musical way.

> If you have to keep tuning a vocal track it's probably time to record another take or find someone who can actually sing.

Sometimes there is no second take. Maybe it’s a live performance and you just want to cover a few flubs. Sometimes the "talent" has no talent but they have a contract. I sang as a backup singer in the studio once with a guy who recorded the song one line at a time because he simply couldn’t sing to save his life. We would sing the line and he would try and mimic us. But he had connections and he had a recording contract and so it was our job to make him sound good.

So sometimes you have to make due with what you have to work with. Recently, I recorded a children’s concert where one child really had a hard time hearing themselves when they soloed and sang the opening notes off key but otherwise they were a good singer. I fixed that performance with Melodyne Uno and no one who wasn’t there that night could tell anything was done to the vocals (and even some people who were there swear it sounded like that). Some jobs just require special tools. Melodyne Uno is one of the tools for me.

~jr

Subject:RE: Sony in the Dust!!

Reply by: Iacobus

Date:8/30/2007 10:52:34 AM

"I sang as a backup singer in the studio once with a guy who recorded the song one line at a time because he simply couldn’t sing to save his life. We would sing the line and he would try and mimic us. But he had connections and he had a recording contract and so it was our job to make him sound good."

Yeah, I bet he had, "connections," all right. *snort* XD

As an aside, it's kind of sad. You have people who have no business being in this business and the real talent gets buried in it all.

OK, I'm done digressing. :)

Iacobus