Originally Posted By: moltopiano
NineZero is supposedly based on an australian heavy rock singer.

The singer goes by the moniker "Ninezero", is based in Japan and speaks Japanese, which probably factored heavily into why he was selected.

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I've heard some good productions using his voice. My concern is, is this voice going to have the same problem as Kevin where it only sounds good in some instances. Is this because Dreamtronics is producing the voices, or do you really have to coax a performance out of the voice? Are you going to run into that same problem again.

Ninezero is even less flexible than Kevin.

You can adjust parameters like Gender that will allow to adjust the position of the formants, but it's still going to sound very much like the singer.

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For instance, Solaria and Asterian are produced by a completely different company. They did it right. With normal editing, those voices can shine, again depending on the type of music you're doing. Right now, I'm doing theater music, and these two sound good. Solaria can sound good on a lot of different types of music though.

This reflects the skill of the singers, as well as their vocal styles. The problem with targeting a specific style is the voice can't do a lot.

Eclipsed Sounds has put out some very good voicebanks. Being native speakers helps, as does their background in using synthetic voices prior to forming the company.

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They really need to put out a "lite version" to try before you buy.

You've already noted the issues with doing this. It's not cheap to do, and it's up to each company to decide if they want to do that.

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I know that they're a small company, but they need to have some kind of refund if you're not happy with the voice. It's $80 bucks for these voices, so if it doesn't work, you're out the money.

Refunds are a pain to process, and there's no way to externally retract a license with the software. They obviously would rather take the hit.

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And the demos they have aren't selling the voice. What sold me was the covers that people are doing on youtube. I realize now that all the productions for Kevin are high tenor pop songs. Kevin ain't never going to do a country song...

English isn't their primary market. Even Natalie, which purports to be a "native" English speaker, has a strong accent.

-- David Cuny
My virtual singer development blog

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