There's no doubt that Vocaloid can be quite good. Here's a comparison of all three programs doing "Yesterday":

Yesterday (Vocaloid, "Oliver" voice)
Yesterday (Sinsy)
Yesterday (UTAU, "Camila Melodia" voice)

Vocaloid is a commercial product. The editor runs around $100US, and doesn't include any voice libraries. Voice libraries run about $130US. There are a number of characters that target English, although they all seem to have accents of some sort.

The results can be very good, but it requires spending money and learning a new software program.


Jinriki Vocaloid ("manual Vocaloid") consists of manually cutting and pasting together phonemes of a singer, and creating a new song. (It helps when the language has a limited phoneme set).

UTAU is a free program that started out automating that manual process, and eventually grew into a much more powerful program. Voice banks are created by users, and quality varies dramatically. There are some UTAUoids that rival the quality commercial Vocaloid voice banks.

But... Getting good English results from UTAU can be a challenge, because it requires running a Japanese program with limited translation, and finding a good English voice bank.


Sinsy apparently came out of a research project. I wouldn't be surprised to find that it becomes commercial at some point. There is currently only one English voice for it, and it appears to be built from a Japanese voice, so it's got a pretty strong accent.

Using Sinsy only requires uploading a MusicXML file of the vocals, and just about every music notation program (except for BiaB, hint, hint) does that. It's really easy.


There are other options. For example, MelodyAssistant has a VirtualSinger. It sounds like they're using the free Festival voice synthesizer. Listening to the VirtualSinger demos gives a good comparison to what's changed in the technology.


I think this technology is still very much in development, so adding it to BiaB is an iffy proposition. But adding features (like MusicXML) that make interfacing with tools like Sinsy makes a lot of sense.

-- David Cuny
My virtual singer development blog

Vocal control, you say. Never heard of it. Is that some kind of ProTools thing?