Imitone -- wow! Most embarassing post I ever started

[Harry_HH]

This is one of the strangest thread in the Kvr, ever. Competes of the top top-weird placement with the Bernhard Lloyd imitator.

[Ploki]

yeah i read it a little yesterday too, and its pretty bizarre.

[Tj Shredder]

There is a difference between "I've ever seen" and "I've ever heard"...

[Krakatau]

There is a difference between "I've ever seen" and "I've ever heard"...

- you've ever read that ?????

[don1thedon]

I just got an email offering the opportunity to upgrade from Imitone to Imitone Studio. What is Imitone Studio? Furthermore, why are you selling upgrades when Imitone is still only at version 0.10, and hasn’t reached 1.0 yet? Beyond that, what about those of us who paid substantially more for the never delivered Imitone Prime? I am not pleased.

Likewise!
I ran with the original kickstarter, seemed like an interesting effort at the time but no way would I consider dropping any more spondulas on him, there was never anything particularly usable from him.
Lesson learned!

[whyterabbyt]

but shouldnt we all be grateful for the opportunity to subsidise some twat's dillettantism for a few years? sheesh.

[toine6]

I bought this long ago and it's NEVER worked for me. The program won't start. I can't even remember what the problem was, I think it maybe gave me an error saying I was missing some kind of framework thing, or who knows. Have not tried the latest version, but I won't get my hopes up. I didn't expect this to be a multi year project. So far, a complete waste of money. Maybe it will work one day. I am getting a new computer that's 64 bit, so "You're telling me there's a chance?"

[No_Use]

This is one of the strangest thread in the Kvr, ever. Competes of the top top-weird placement with the Bernhard Lloyd imitator.

Ah the 'Alphaville guy', I remember that one.

[don1thedon]

but shouldnt we all be grateful for the opportunity to subsidise some twat's dillettantism for a few years? sheesh.

Prize for making me check the dictionary whyterabbyt
(I knew the twat part!!)

[Harry_HH]

This is one of the strangest thread in the Kvr, ever. Competes of the top top-weird placement with the Bernhard Lloyd imitator.

Ah the 'Alphaville guy', I remember that one.

Yeah, still must laugh aloud when I remember that rascal.

[Ah_Dziz]

I bought this when it first was put on Kickstarter. I would think that with 100k this kid could have hired a coder that could properly implement midi. Unless he can make this plugin into a simple “drop it onto a track and sing/play and midi comes out the other end”, plugin, this “groundbreaking” piece of technology is toast.
If anyone wants to setup something very similar to this, you can do it with Melda production’s effects (the pitch tracking is not the best). You can also do it with some of the fun scripting plugins like Blue Cat’s or Reaper’s, or in an environment like reaktor or Bidule.

[zadillo]

I kickstarted imitone prime in 2014. I emailed to ask and he confirmed my license was for imitone studio (which is what I see in app) and I don’t need to upgrade anything.

[ionutp23]

Anyone who need help with imitone let me know im not from imitone team but i can help you. using imitone for long time and let be honest imitone is the best app possible maybe first of it kind. the support my be bad and the app not working as expected i agree but have you seen any other app like this? i didnt however a good app need time for developing and money. That being said drom me a comment with isue you all get. I read some one got error about missing framework. is called Net framework and is from microsoft lot of apps requiest this days version from 2 to tha latest this days.

[interactopia]

Hello [this is Evan from imitone team] —

Gotta say that upgrade offer left me puzzled (to say the least) too.

Not our most elegant communication.

We rebranded "imitone prime" to "imitone studio" a few years ago, and that has created a little confusion lately. To be clear, they're the same product: imitone, plus an expanding set of advanced audio & midi features (which will see several additions in 2020).

I've had to refund more than a dozen attempts to upgrade from imitone prime to imitone studio.

With the release of our 0.10 technology and a new studio feature, we raised studio's price from $60 to $75. The "midi2020" promocode is a way for long-time watchers to buy or upgrade for the original price/difference. It's also a way to celebrate the newly-ratified MIDI 2.0 specification, which I've helped to develop.

I hope I’m not remembering this wrong, but my recollection of the original promises for this product claimed that it was using some revolutionary new detection method which worked better and faster than all the others. Here’s a tip for anyone who wants to make an actual revolutionary pitch tracking system: there are only a few ways of accomplishing this task, including resonator banks, FFT, counting zero crossings, Kalman filters... what you need to do is build a very fast FPGA hardware device which uses all of these methods simultaneously and then arrives at a weighted average between them. Good luck, and off you go!

Edit: and actually, machine learning is probably the way forward.

Sounds exciting! If you're developing a pitch-to-MIDI application, drop me a line. I'm forming a coalition within the MIDI Manufacturers' Association to advocate for some related profiles in MIDI 2.0.

Our experimental 0.10 technology uses some machine learning, although not the neural-network kind. It builds on the self-attuning resonator technology we've been developing since the beginning — an adaptive time-domain algorithm distantly related to autocorrelation. It took 18 months or so to develop, and the model is very rudimentary at the moment, but I think it was well worth the time — it's the best available, and will keep improving.

I would think that with 100k this kid could have hired a coder that could properly implement midi.

Maybe he's run through the $100K that he raised for the Imitone that he couldn't make in five years?

Haha, the only programmer I know who's gullible enough to work 7 years straight on a project like this for 100k is me. I pay my student better than that! imitone has been sustained by new pre-orders for a while now.

MIDI is easy to implement. The hard part is pitch-to-MIDI. There's a 30-year history of products in this family — online, offline, vocal, instrumental, and in most cases falling far short of the hype (exceptions noted below). I believe every voice-to-MIDI system that exists today, even imitone, falls short of being able to cleanly "snapshot" musical ideas as they happen. Companies a thousand times our size have given up on it. So... I continue my research under the banner of "mind to melody". For the last few years that has been into pitch tracking. But we have some serious work to do in music theory and transcription too.

As Phase 4 pitch tracking research was winding down, I expanded imitone's day-to-day team from one to four. As you can imagine, that means we need to sell a few more pre-orders and upgrades. It also means we'll be much more active in communicating, developing, updating and supporting our software.

I bought this long ago and it's NEVER worked for me. The program won't start. I can't even remember what the problem was, I think it maybe gave me an error saying I was missing some kind of framework thing, or who knows.

imitone should work on any computer running at least OS X 10.7 or Windows XP. I take backwards compatibility very seriously — although we may drop support for >10 year-old platforms eventually.

If it doesn't work, in most cases you should get an error report window with some fields and a "send to imitone HQ" button — those go straight to us, and we actually read them (when the address is filled in). If you don't get an error report window, you can E-mail our team at support@imitone.com .

Let's talk Plugins

So, Evan, hows the cave-life these days?
Any progress on finally giving the VST2 a GUI - hopefully a totally normal VST one?

This is happening in 2020 — along with a Mac plugin. We just need to squeeze it in among many other subprojects: R&D, MMA, features, mobile, education...

Meanwhile (about a year ago to be more precise) LegacyMIDICCOutEvent was added to the VST3 SDK (also supporting pitch bend from what I gather), so making a proper VST3 should now be possible?

This is a natural consideration for our next update to the plugin! But at this point, considering Steinberg is subsidiary of YAMAHA, who invested deeply in MIDI 2.0... I am keeping my fingers crossed for the next generation of plugin technology.

Unless he can make this plugin into a simple “drop it onto a track and sing/play and midi comes out the other end”, plugin, this “groundbreaking” piece of technology is toast.

imitone comes with a VST/VST3 plugin with audio-to-MIDI and audio-to-audio flavors. The second one works in virtually all DAWs and uses a virtual MIDI cable like the app. The plugins aren't particularly pretty or user-friendly, but they run the 0.9 algorithm which probably makes them the best you'll find.

If anyone wants to setup something very similar to this, you can do it with Melda production’s effects (the pitch tracking is not the best). You can also do it with some of the fun scripting plugins like Blue Cat’s or Reaper’s, or in an environment like reaktor or Bidule.

I've researched about three dozen other pitch-to-MIDI products. If you're looking for alternatives to imitone, I believe these are the best (by use-case):

• Dubler Studio Kit — for live vocals & beatboxing
• JamOrigin product line — live instruments
• Fishman Triple Play — live polyphonic string instruments
• Melodyne — offline voice pitch analysis (MIDI workflow isn't great)

[Ah_Dziz]

Hi Evan. I have a decent voice to midi setup in Bidule that tracks pitch and amp envelope along with some other vocal properties and converts it all to midi note, pitch bend and two CCs of your choice. I do dig jam origin’s stuff. Unfortunately nothing, including you guys’ product is a simple (just like any plugin) setup for just singing or humming and getting a useable midi stream inside your daw. I’m sure it will get there. Waves’ new vocal synth could easily have a midi output added and take the monophonic part of this market over as it tracks better than anything else I’ve used (which is almost every pitch tracking plugin ever released).