VocalWriter for Mac

User Reviews

• This is the best.of several such programs I have tried

  alphasun4July 13, 2009

  Pros

  Good human voice simulation, especially the Sarah voice. Allows me, a male, to get female vocal backing and demos easily. Good, usable editability of notes and phonetics. Entering lyrics is very quick. Shareware (I was very glad to pay the $39)

  Cons

  MAC only Playback display does not have a running cursor in the Notes view. Can't be run as a Cubase plugin

  Summary

  Most of these products have a few very good demos, but of course the question is how easy it is to achieve something usable or even good. VocalWriter scores very well on this criterion. Vocaloid is also good, but apart from the cost issue, I prefer the VocalWriter "Sarah" voice, a nice soprano, to Vocaloid's "Miriam", despite the latter being a sampled professional singer. Note: Preferences in voice timbre are very subjective, so others may not agree with this point. Lyric and phoneme entry is quite easy, and in my case I find it useful to be able to modify the default US accent to reduce or cut down the terminal rs. Export of aiff files is available, so it's easy to create a vocal line from a MIDI file and import it into a Cubase project. There are even frills, such as reverb, chorusing the same voice and making an instrument voice out of strings or other synth sounds, both with simple-to-use controls -- but the main thing is that you can do usable demo lead cvocals and of course backing vocals. This is a well-designed and developed program and great value. I would not say dogmatically that it's better than Vocaloid or the others in the field, because my tests have not been extensive enough, but usability is very important and VocalWriter is definitely easy to use and has ample features.

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• Keep developing!

  April 4, 2003

  Pros

  Cons

  Summary

  Jaded Midi geeks moan about limitations, and, I suppose, they're right. But the core of this thing is brilliant, the voices can be finessed, and the work I produced was good enough for upload to webradio. Keep developing!!!

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• The only program that sings.

  February 21, 2002

  Pros

  Cons

  Summary

  I wish for more singers in the next version.

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• I'm hooked!

  January 22, 2001

  Pros

  Cons

  Summary

  When I first fired this up, I wasn't sure I'd be able to do much with the voices. However, patience and imagination prevailed, and now I can't stop composing. Most of the instrument samples are quite good; the voices need some finessing.

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• do not stop the development

  January 9, 2001

  Pros

  Cons

  Summary

  Vocalwriter is a fine instrument to make your computer sing, it should therefore be developped into a bigger vocal-app with several music styles like square-dancing, hiphop and close harmony, this is my wish.

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• quality midi editing, but thats all

  January 4, 2001

  Pros

  Cons

  Summary

  While the midi editing is fairly good, the vocal synthisiseing is less then grand (though much better than nothing). It also requires virtual memory turned off.

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• why can't I download it???!?!?!??!?

  August 19, 2000

  Pros

  Cons

  Summary

  can't be downloaded, horrible

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