I compared 4 pitch correction plugins. Here are the results!

[CrankyOldFool]

Hello all! I was wondering how similar current pitch correction plugins are to each other, and which ones have the highest quality. So I tested several of them out, and I want to share the results for anyone else who's interested here.

Methodology
Tuning out of pitch vocals is the most common use case for these plugins, but largely, they sound very similar when making minor adjustments. So in order to test them in a way that would expose some weaknesses, I put them through a stress test.

I picked a vocal sample which was already in tune, from an Alicia Keys song, and pitched it 5 semitones up. This is a major enough change that we can easily hear artifacts and compare the results, so it makes it very interesting to compare them. However, I'll acknowledge that this isn't a typical use case for these, so it's possible that this is a bit unfair towards plugins that are optimized for subtle changes.

Results
Please hear for yourself how each plugin did with this. I'll add my own thoughts, as well as some clarification, below.
Original (for reference): https://vocaroo.com/1bnd4GlaigZA
Melodyne: https://vocaroo.com/1eo8zKiBmPnJ
Waves Tune: https://vocaroo.com/1jBgtE0M5C5h
CrispyTuner: https://vocaroo.com/1boxrP4f1iOj
NewTone: https://vocaroo.com/1hNPYCRGlEPf

My Thoughts
I think Melodyne produces the most "realistic"/natural results out of these four plugins, but it sounds somewhat muffled. I think some of the dynamics have been lost here, and while it does sound the most human, I think it also degrades the quality of the recording a lot.

In terms of usage outside of this benchmark, I found that the interface does a great job of grouping notes together in the way I would expect as a producer, meaning that there weren't any tiny sub-notes disconnected from the main singing. Melodyne does some sibilance detection and handles sibilant sounds differently when correcting the pitch, which I think helps make it sound more natural. I think those two aspects of it are very valuable, and make it stand out. It also offers a volume levelling feature to make quiet notes louder and vice versa, which none of the others have. However, in practice, I got terrible results with that feature. Melodyne lacks any sort of synthetic vibrato, which I feel is a shame for a plugin that costs this much. Even though many would say that synthetic vibrato is a gimmick, Waves and CrispyTuner both give you that feature at far lower prices.

Waves Tune produces a very sharp sounding result with very crisp tones, but it has a huge artifact towards the end of the sample. It's worth keeping in mind that all of these plugins received the exact same input, but this was the only one that had such a huge issue. For that reason alone, I think it's hard to recommend this in terms of quality, but it definitely can be seen as the "budget" option considering it goes on sale for around $30 and has features comparable to the others.

Outside of the benchmark, I have a few other complaints here. The interface is straight out of the '90s, and it just looks like a dinosaur of a plugin compared to the others. The note detection struggles and often splits up a note into 3 notes, with one tiny little out of tune one in the middle. With those complaints out of the way though, it's really packed with features. It can handle natural vibrato, synthetic vibrato, and even allows you to draw the pitch directly into any shape you want (no other tested plugins allows this). That allows a lot of creativity in my opinion. One tiny feature of Waves that I love is that the piano roll can play a reference note for you (for instance, playing a reference C3 note). This helps a lot when you're moving vocals between notes rather than quantizing them.

It's almost unfair to include CrispyTuner here because of a quirk compared to the others. In this plugin, the pitch curve gets mapped to a series of quantized "target notes" during the recording (at least in the graphical mode). That means that when you transpose the notes, you're transposing the quantized notes instead of the pitches that the singer actually hit. And when it's time to correct, it simply snaps the pitch curve to those target notes, which means that this one has more of an "auto tune" sound versus the other ones, which are just directly transposing the vocals. I thought about removing this, but I think it's fair to include because it's a direct competitor to the others, and because this seems like a limitation that should be noted.

It's worth noting that the author of CrispyTuner is here on KVR, so this could easily be fixed in the future. And of the plugins here, this one is actually under active development (along with Melodyne but that one's pace is far slower), which makes me think that it might soon surpass a lot of the others. The interface is good and it has the advantage of being capable of live tuning as well, which is unique among these. I like the "slide" feature of this one, which lets you slide from one note to another smoothly, and the fact that it includes nice extras like synthetic vibrato. I'd love to see ARA support instead of depending on ReWire, which is already deprecated and being removed from DAWs like FL Studio. And I think the note detection could be massively improved. This plugin does let you customize the note detection parameters, but it seems to detect notes only through forwards playback (like Waves) rather than analyzing the whole piece like Melodyne and NewTone. The result is that there are a lot of tiny mistaken notes. As a very minor thing, it would also be great to copy the ability to "draw" a pitch like Waves does, but that's much less important than the aforementioned issues. So again, I think there's a lot of potential here, but also a huge room for improvement. I wouldn't use this personally until some of the above is fixed.

NewTone keeps the sharpness of the original, but has a more robotic sound to it than others. There are a few places where you can hear the tuning come in a bit heavy handed, and I think the clarity isn't worth it in this case.

It's worth noting that NewTone is especially buggy. It crashed twice during my testing, and several times it turned the clip into a guttural growling noise. It took me several attempts to get this to produce a proper result. I think that the interface is actually the best out of all of these, with the knobs that control centering/variation/transition time being very intuitive and more convenient than Melodyne's "macros". The note detection is quite good as well. The results are what I would consider the second best, after Melodyne. However, it was so unstable that I would never depend on it for professional work.

Conclusion
I feel that all of these have some downsides. But personally, I feel that Melodyne performed best in this benchmark. I haven't tested Logic's Flex Pitch, Cubase's VariAudio, AutoTune Pro, or Revoice Pro, but I would love to get my hands on those to try them at a later date. If anyone else wants to add their own experiences, or try this out in the plugins that I didn't try myself, please leave your opinion as well.

[JamelaBanderson]

This is great! Thanks for posting. I noticed that Melodyne was the only one that sounded correctly transposed. "Looked at her" - the word "her" was off a little on every track except Melodyne.

[morphex]

Thank you for taking the time to share your experiences.

[SparkySpark]

Thanks for this shootout and for the clear and to the point comments.

[Eine Alte Oma]

i only tested melodyne and waves tune of these. i especially used melodyne a lot already and after a while you can really hear it in the audio when it was used. the typical melodyne-ish sound is one where something in the background of the sample just sounds weird and flat, no matter how soft you processed it. that's why i usually go harder in melodyne on purpose. because if you actually embrace that sound it's not a degredation anymore. gladly it's really subtle, so you don't have to completely twist the sound to embrace the artefacts. i don't have such a strong opinion on waves tune's sound. i only used it for some months, because when my computer died i couldn't get the license to run again and the support stopped helping me after a few e-mails. waves' license system by itself is reason enough to fiddle around with those plugins. melodyne is not perfect, but it's really good, reliable and versatile. if i wanted a more flavour-ish tuning sound i'd probably get autotune, but i couldn't justify the price to myself yet

[LeVzi]

Would be very interesting to see how Cubase variaudio compares.

[anttimaatteri]

what about reasons pitch correction? i once just wanted to buy reason for that

[chk071]

Thanks for this test. I think they all sound a bit unnatural.

[HansP]

Would be very interesting to see how Cubase variaudio compares.

I watched a friend using Cubase clip editing with all its features, and it was excellent and very transparent. Especially trial/error about finding the best sounding version worked smoothly.

[Bombadil]

People need to learn to sing and tune their instruments.
Says the guy with Melodyne Studio….

[fese]

People need to learn to sing and tune their instruments.
Says the guy with Melodyne Studio….

I very much like to learn! How to use pitch correction software, for example.

[Bombadil]

There's a tutorial vid for that…

[trmupstage]

Would be very interesting to see how Cubase variaudio compares.

I think Variaudio is great. I don't think anything beats it. Too bad it is tied to only Cubase/Nuendo. People on other platforms would find it very useful. I use it in Nuendo 11 mostly. The latest versions of it really speeds up the workflow. Personally, I use it only to tighten up slight pitch issues and never go for the hard pitch correction that sounds unnatural. I don't think anyone can hear the effect in the things I work on. If subtle correction can't fix the issue, the singer needs to do it again.

[Scotty]

Would be very interesting to see how Cubase variaudio compares.

I think Variaudio is great. I don't think anything beats it. Too bad it is tied to only Cubase/Nuendo. People on other platforms would find it very useful. I use it in Nuendo 11 mostly. The latest versions of it really speeds up the workflow. Personally, I use it only to tighten up slight pitch issues and never go for the hard pitch correction that sounds unnatural. I don't think anyone can hear the effect in the things I work on. If subtle correction can't fix the issue, the singer needs to do it again.

Pitch correction in variaudio is good if you are within a couple of semitones. Not sure which I prefer. Time correction is often better in Melodyne. Revoice is my go to though for time correction. I don't find Revoice pitch correction to be intuitive but I haven't given it enough of a chance yet as usually Variaudio is good enough.

[vurt]

There's a tutorial vid for that…

is there one to turn george formby in to tom waits?