VirSyn User Forum - New Vocaloid

Schräge Musik Senior Member With all due respect.......... Posts: 406 Gender:	New Vocaloid 07/22/09 at 09:54:02 I see that there is a new Vocaloid available. It's called Sonika. I suggest everyone has a listen to it. This will show you how much better Cantor is in terms of sound and flexibility.
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Robert YaBB Newbies I Love VirSyn! Posts: 19	Re: New Vocaloid Reply #1 - 01/29/10 at 21:53:03 Sounds cool, but exactly IS a vocaloid? (I'm obviously not a Cantor user... YET!)
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Schräge Musik

Senior Member

With all due
respect..........

Posts: 406
Gender: male

Re: New Vocaloid
Reply #2 - 01/30/10 at 15:54:25

Vocaloid is Yamaha's take on a voice synthesiser. Briefly, they've tried to record virtually every syllable of the English language by a variety of singers. When you buy this thing, you buy a single voice and all of the stuuf needed to put the syllables together.

To my mind, it sounds good as a backing vocalist but there appears to be very little flexibility in th e programming system as everything is preset. With Cantor, on the other hand, everything is available for tweaking. I guess Cantor takes a little more work but, as with everything, the more options you have, the more effort required but the better the results that may be obtained.

ANother difference is that each Vocaloid is but a single voice. Cantor allows you to change/create your own.

In addition to better flexibility of programming, Cantor has the advantage that it is 'live'. You have your results as soon as you program/play them while, with Vocaloid, every phrase has to be 'rendered (though I'm not sure how big a task this is).

I actually quite like the sound of the various Vocaloids but I far prefer Cantor. For me, amongst other things, it has far more character.

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Robert

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Posts: 19

Re: New Vocaloid
Reply #3 - 01/30/10 at 17:32:40

So the Yamaha one works like "freezing a track" in Cubase, sort of... that's not the same thing, at all.

Yeah, to me it seems like Cantor is what *I* want. (I am just waiting for Harry to cut me a deal. Wink

Another question then, when the phrase "create your own voice", what does that pertain, or what properties are available to control/adjust for that purpose?

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Schräge Musik Senior Member With all due respect.......... Posts: 406 Gender:	Re: New Vocaloid Reply #4 - 01/31/10 at 01:27:21 Yes. Like a freeze. But it has to be done after even the smallest tweak. There are a whole host of parameters available for voice editting. These include partial edit (number and level), breath noise (complex shape), glottal fqs, eq, resonance, openness. Then there is a formant filter for each phoneme. The list goes on................
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Robert YaBB Newbies I Love VirSyn! Posts: 19	Re: New Vocaloid Reply #5 - 02/01/10 at 00:50:35 Excellent! So (more questions, while I am at it, lol) are all those parameters automatable, or most, some or none?
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Schräge Musik

Senior Member

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Posts: 406
Gender: male

Re: New Vocaloid
Reply #6 - 02/01/10 at 10:49:44

I'm away from music comp at the moment but I would doubt it. I'm sure it's a case that you 'compose' your voice (and, if you want, phonemes) and use that as your 'instrument'. While playing there are a number of controls that can be used to make alterations to the voice - and these are what change your sound from being very good to great. There is plenty of scope for detailed 'sculpting'.

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omnirife

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Re: New Vocaloid
Reply #7 - 07/29/10 at 20:03:56

I had Vocaloid Leon before I converted to Cantor. Cantor is much more flexible, as noted above, and there was no live sound and it didn't function very usefully as a VST/AU, you had to ReWire it. It is only available for Windows, which is itself a problem because I had nothing but issues when trying to make songs on Windows. Other people find WIndows ok but it didn't work for me. There is a profoundly cheesy element to Vocaloid, there's this cheesy sound to the voices that is impossible to get rid of. View any user videos on YouTube for instant evidence. Cantor is like a blank, white canvas in a room stocked with all the paint and brushes you need to create whatever picture you want. There is nothing on the canvas but the possibilities of the picture you make are only limited by your imagination. Vocaloid is like getting half a painting that someone has already done and you have to deal with what is there, whether you like it or not.

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