Audio to Midi VST

[Sascha Franck]

[image of one of the ugliest instruments ever spotted snipped...]

And I thought it was hard to get worse than the SynthAxe...

[bermudagold]

ok....been reading and researching....i want to sing my instrument parts because since i'm not a keyboard player, I find it faster to get ideas from my head to track and more expressive to use voice than aftertouch and a pitch wheel on my controller.....that said using my voice as a controller for my vst synths may be asking too much...everyone says its the holy grail....does anyone know what works well for voice?....i'm not so much worried about latency as i can convert offline to midi although real time would be nice even if I had to use the interface's direct monitor.....but the translation has to be somewhat faithful...I've tried
midifier (vst) www.knzaudio.com
widi (standalone) www.widisoft.com
digital ear (standalone) www.digital-ear.com
rephrase (standalone)
akoff (standalone) www.akoff.com
solo explorer (standalone) www.recognisoft.com
melodyne1.5 (standalone)

none seem to work very well....and some of them are quite expensive...wrong notes,notes missing, wrong pitch,note length wrong, all vibrato,tremolo and expression lost......the best was solo explorer, follwed by akoff.....but beware the conversions in the app can sound a lot better than the midi file they export...learned that the hard way...so demos that dont allow you to at least export 1 or 2 midi files are worthless.....i think this was the case with "audio to midi" tallstick.com and intelliscore 5.1 www.intelliscore.net .....so dontreally know if they are any good.....anybody try them?....is midi the limitation?....does midi just not have enough parameters and increments to achieve this?....if so bring on open sound control please....tried some more
"sound 2 midi" (standalone)...couldnt get demo to work....anyway, now i'm hearing from u guys musiciendoz and the extractor.....anybody try them with voice and have good results?....dont want to waste any more money if this is a lost cause.....please let me know.....this workflow would be so amazing....jamming out each instrument track by track for the duration of the song responding to what the vocals and other instruments are doing,...breakdowns, key changes, freestyle variations on the melody.....all without having to sit at the piano transposing note by note whats in my head killin the vibe and the inspiration.....maybe its just a dream...lol

[TotcProductions]

NUTON MUSICENDOZ

Simple. works good. only costs 20 bux. ; )

peace!

[blurk]

What about Super Eel 2.0?

Thanks for that. I tried it and for me it was better than TheExtractor, but still very temperamental. Funnily enough, I had better result driving Super Eel from my bass guitar than the electric, and bass is supposed to be so much more difficult to track.

I'm going to try the demo of Musiciendoz next.

[tconrardy]

Ive been having good results with Kantos, which is actually takes an audio signal to drive a synth. it makes pretty unique sounds however. I did a bank of sounds for it ( at PA) You have to be precise on what notes you play on your guitar however. I also use a casio DG-20 MIDI guitar which works good, and only paid 50.00 for it

TC

[damstraversaz]

NUTON MUSICENDOZ

Simple. works good. only costs 20 bux. ; )

peace!

same for me. I use it with a clarinet and it's amasing.
I never had a good result with the others vst.

[Zmies]

As an alternative, I'm keeping my eye on the new voice controlled trumpet from Yamaha. It's been out for a while, but I haven't found a single review
yet. Depending on how well it tracks, it could provide a very expressive way to enter midi notes. Then again it might be total crap.

http://www.yamaha-europe.com/yamaha_eur ... ies/EZ_TP/

[Lunch Money]

I was also going to mention Nuton Musiciendoz, but it's already been done.

Greg

[bermudagold]

thanks 4 the replies.....tried "the extractor"....it has the most options for tweaking the source and target to possibly find a translation that is faith ful, but like was said you cant tell if it is tracking well because every 10 sec it drops out for 5 sec....demo limitation...makes it hard to evaluate....during the 10 sec i did hear wasn't good for voice or drums......tried musciendoz...could get latency down low between my interface and live or tracktion,...but not really suitable for real time....in playback mode translation wasn't great for vocals or drums...dont know about guitar...but was highly dependent on synth you routed to...in tweaking the min and max note sliders you can get something potentially useful on some synths for very simple melodies that dont have short notes or varying attacks.....in the end didn't work for my use.....rather than audio to midi conversion to sing my instruments, i also tried the FFT vocoder route....some work pretty well (didn't test guitar for the original poster) if they use a lot of bands, only problem is ur limited to the instruments in the synth provided....not ur vst collection....vokator at least has a sampler synth allowing you to sing sampled instruments.....but with all fft vocoders i tried you lose a lot of the original instruments character unlike audio to midi conversion....i tried alien solo, vokator, and kantos.....vokator is most tweakable, kantos wasn't useful to me...but maybe for sounscapes and movies....i was able to get a few promising results out of alien solo....in the end i'm having to use an audio to midi converter to get a general idea of the nottes i sung,..and knowing the note layout on the piano...learning to play what i sung....not ideal or my dream workflow,...but faster than transposing note by note by ear....maybe helpful for the guitar folk too......sorry for the long post,..jus wanted to be detailed in case anybody was lookin to do the same things.....thanks again

[aesova]

Blurk, I agree with you. I emailed them about their demo. It sucks! It not only cuts out every 10 seconds but every 30 you have to click "ok" on a reminder that tells you that it will cut out every 10 seconds. A simple beep would be suffice. THe tracking was the best with extractor so far but because of the horrible demo, I'm not going to buy it just yet. Thanks.

I ended up buying this a few months ago, and it tracks well, better than anything else I have found - far better than fft to midi in bidule.

The latency tends to be higher than most audio driven stuff, but if I lower the buffer size and keep the ASIO latency low I can get it to work pretty well.

The Fretted Synth stuff tracks much faster, and IMO better, but you are limited to analog synths sounds. If you are looking beyond that, to control any VSTi, I'd go with TazMan and just tweak tweak tweak.

[blurk]

Well, I've now tried a lot of these plus some new ones:

• - TheExtractor - demo too painful to use
  - Supereel - didn't work really well for me
  - Fretted Synth - couldn't get it to track stably, seemed to work better on bass than guitar, but too random to be useable.
  - Nuton Musiciendoz - installed demo and it immediately claimed the trial period has expired so that was useless to evaluate
  - Synodeia 2 - actually seemed to work to some extent, though still somewhat random.

But I'm becoming more convinced that, for guitar/bass to MIDI anyhow, a hardware solution like the Roland stuff is the way to go. I tried (for the first time) a 2nd-hand GR-50, and even without the pickup properly mounted it seemed to work more reliably and accurately than any of these plugins.