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If you get Solaria as your first female, you will find she is very versatile. To decide which first male you would like, you should listen to each of either Hayden, Saros or Kevin, because they are quite different, and all good. Saros has a lot of different tone qualities, and can sing quite high, and is more for rock, pop. Hayden has a beautiful mellow raspy voice (sort of husky) and good for soulful country as well as very high male harmonies. Kevin is more traditional and some say a little "square" but has a very good track-cutting tone, and it is possible to make him sound like James Taylor. Once you get good with the first two voices you will find that singers with quite different tone qualities work well for harmonies, because you can hear the distinctiveness of each so the group sounds bigger. Here is a track using four different male voices (acapella) on top of some women, and I like how I can hear the difference between tenor, baritone and bass: Synth V Choir - Try to Remember
Last edited by ThomasS; 01/07/24 05:27 PM.
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Jeff, In relation to Thomas's excellent advice, a number of voices are available freely in what is called 'Lite' versions. There are also some beta versions freely available. These versions do not have all the abilities of the fully-fledged versions that can use cross synthesis to sing in Japanese, English and Mandarin. The English 'lite' versions, though, give an excellent insight into how a voice will sound. Many people use these versions exclusively to create some excellent productions. They're found at... https://resource.dreamtonics.com/download/English/Elinor Forte is pretty good. My first voices were Natalie and Kevin. If you are interested, I used them to create a duet version of a song a wrote a few years ago. This was second ever Synth V project. https://soundcloud.com/noel-adams/every-single-day-nkThere is also a Synthesizer V forum found at the link below. https://forum.synthesizerv.com/Regards, --Noel
MY SONGS...Audiophile BIAB 2025
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Thomas, Regarding your original post... 1) I loaded the MIDI file into BIAB using the Open command. This created an MGU file with the MIDI file loaded on the Melody track as a multichannel MIDI (this is standard BIAB behaviour). 2) I then used 'Save Special' to save the file as a MIDI file with the lyrics. I noticed that you mentioned that you had been unable to get BIAB to save lyrics in a MIDI file. To do this, when you get to the option regarding what format to save the MIDI, click on "Options" and make sure that "Write lyrics" in General MIDI format is selected. ![[Linked Image - Only viewable when logged in]](https://www.pgmusic.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=download&Number=26957&filename=midi lyrics.jpg) I then opened the original MIDI file and the BIAB-saved MIDI file in Reaper so that I could more clearly see what was happening. ![[Linked Image - Only viewable when logged in]](https://www.pgmusic.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=download&Number=26958&filename=midi based lyrics - internet file versus biab file.jpg) As can be seen, BIAB saves MIDI as "Text events" while the original MIDI saves the lyrics as a "Lyric" event. As Matt has already mentioned, MIDI is quite old. I don't know whether it's true or not, but I have read that in the early days of MIDI, storing lyrics was not part of the MIDI format. These days, I think text events are stored as a kind of meta-data (I'm not absolutely sure about this and I'm quite happy to be corrected). Also... when I save your MGU file as a MIDI file from BIAB with the MIDI options of "save harmony to individual tracks" active, things look fine. Once I load the file into Reaper, all the tracks are visible and individual. ![[Linked Image - Only viewable when logged in]](https://www.pgmusic.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=download&Number=26960&filename=harmony on individual tracks.jpg) As many long-time users of BIAB will attest to, it has often been the case the internet MIDI files are not an exact fit with BIAB because the way in which the internet files were created and saved is not exactly the same as the way BIAB works with MIDI. This would seem to be another one of those cases. The best fix, which you have already discovered is to open the file in BIAB and then save it using BIAB. This will create a version of the file that is the most compatible with the BIAB. I'm not sure that this helps but, hopefully, the insight shown in the above images is useful. Regards, --Noel P.S. I love your version of "Try to Remember"! It has a "Swingle Singers" sound about it. That's pretty incredible 
MY SONGS...Audiophile BIAB 2025
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Thomas, Continuing on from above... When it comes to working with MIDI harmonies, Realband is superior to Band In A Box. You have access to running MGU files as well as the tools available in BIAB. The big difference is that Realband will automatically put generated harmony on it's own tracks where it's easier to save the files for use with Synth V. If you haven't already experimented and tamed Realband, I encourage you to try this. It will definitely streamline creating MIDI harmonies for Synth V. 1) Start Realband and click on the Tracks View. It's on the top row of icons and to the right of 'Copy' and 'Cut'. 2) Open "File 1 - All of Me.MGU". 3) RB will generate the tracks. It's a little slower than BIAB because the tracks are generated fully before playback begins. 4) Stop the automatic playback The Stop button is on the bottom left of the screen with the other transport buttons. 5) Click on the Melody track. Press CTRL+A to select it all. 6) Under the Generate menu at the top of the window, select "Generate MIDI harmony". Select a harmony... I used #50 7) When the option window appears, select "Put harmonies onto multiple new tracks". 8) To save each of the generated MIDI harmony tracks to a file... - Click on the track.
- Press CTRL+A to select the whole track.
- Right click on the selected track and right at the bottom of the menu that appears, select "Track" and then "Save track to file".
- For the file type, select "MIDI" and give the file a name.
I just did this and the files imported into Synth V perfectly. Regards, --Noel
Last edited by Noel96; 01/07/24 09:21 PM.
MY SONGS...Audiophile BIAB 2025
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Thank you so much, Noel!
1) Yes, RealBand is superior to BIAB in creating harmonies for use in Synthesizer, and this was already pointed out by other users on the Synthesizer V forum. But this excludes Mac users, since RealBand is only Windows.
2) But I was really interested to see your careful analysis of how BIAB gets the lyrics from MIDI and then exports them as text events, instead of lyric events. You have really put your finger on the problem! Do you know if there is a midi utility program that can search&replace event types in a file, ie change all text events to lyric events?
3) If you know of such a program, let me know, and I will search around myself too. In any case, what you found is quite interesting because it confirms that BIAB has all the information it needs to both import and export, but it just stores the lyrics it gets in the wrong place. This makes me think that it can be easily fixed.
Last edited by ThomasS; 01/07/24 11:12 PM.
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"Do you know if there is a midi utility program that can search&replace event types in a file, ie change all text events to lyric events?"
Reaper can do that.
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Hi Thomas and Musocity. I've searched around for text events to lyric events and I haven't found anything other than the below script from https://forums.cockos.com/showthread.php?t=199487take = reaper.MIDIEditor_GetTake(reaper.MIDIEditor_GetActive())
index = reaper.MIDI_EnumSelTextSysexEvts(take, -1)
while index > -1 do
_, _, _, _, texttype, _ = reaper.MIDI_GetTextSysexEvt(take, index, nil, nil, nil, 0, "")
if texttype == 1 then -- 1 = type "Text event"
reaper.MIDI_SetTextSysexEvt(take, index, nil, nil, nil, 5, "", true) -- 5 = type Lyrics
end
index = reaper.MIDI_EnumSelTextSysexEvts(take, index)
end
reaper.Undo_OnStateChange2(0, "Convert text events to lyrics") Unfortunately, I don't know enough about scripting in Reaper to be able to develop this. I can certainly access the events one by and change text to lyrics. That is quite easy and quick to do. --Noel
MY SONGS...Audiophile BIAB 2025
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Midi-text-to-lyrics.zip extract and copy Midi text to lyrics.lua In Reper menu Actions > Show Action List > New Action > Load script paste in folder and open Midi text to lyrics.lua select the midi item and run script. If you open the midi in the editor and at the bottom select Text events. EDIT: this will copy the events so you will still have text events as well as lyric events. It can be all changed if need be, it's reading 1 text events and writes to 5 lyric events -- Determine if this event is a lyric message 5 or text 1 --1 = Text --2 = Copyright --3 = Sequence/Track Name --4 = Instrument --5 = Lyric --6 = Marker --7 = Cue --8 = Program --9 = Device
Last edited by musocity; 01/08/24 01:06 AM.
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Thanks, I'll have a look at it.
MY SONGS...Audiophile BIAB 2025
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Delete-all-text-events-in-selected-midi-item.zip this will delete all certain text events by chosen type 1 = Text 2 = Copyright 3 = Sequence/Track Name 4 = Instrument 5 = Lyric 6 = Marker 7 = Cue 8 = Program 9 = Device
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Thanks again! These look great. I'll give them a try tomorrow and let you know how they went
MY SONGS...Audiophile BIAB 2025
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I don't have Reaper (Cubase and Studio One only) so I can't use the handy utility posted by musocity. However, HERE is a tiny Windows utility called Midi Disassembler (mididsm) which converts a MIDI file into an editable text file, or a text file back into a MIDI. With this program, it took me just a minute or two to convert a MIDI file from BIAB which would not show the lyrics in Synthesizer V into another MIDI file which did show the lyrics. Here is what I did: 1) Install mididsm and its dependencies. 2) Run the program and choose "make text" selecting the BIAB-generated MIDI file, which displays the MIDI file in text format with a built-in notepad editor. 3) Inside the notepad editor hit replace and change " |Text" to " |Lyric" (You may not actually have to put the line in front of the words, but I did just in case the word "Text" existed elsewhere that I didn't want to change. 4) Save the text file, and then back in the program select "Make MIDI" and select the saved text file, and now you have a new MIDI file with the lyrics in the right place and it shows lyrics in Synthesizer V. It was so simple that I was a little surprised. Now that I see what an easy thing this is to do, I think someone should report to PGMusic how trivial this is, and change BIAB MIDI export to do this automatically.
Last edited by ThomasS; 01/08/24 08:14 AM.
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Good to here you made you own workaround to this workflow gap in BIAB.
Thanks, Thomas and Noel for a good debug and the tips on Synth V. Thanks musocity for your scripts to edit MIDI. Very productive thread.
Back to the OP Topic, the bug and workflow gaps have been documented and we are in the process of communicating them to PGM.
Studio One (latest version), Win 11 23H2 , i9 -10940X 3.3 GHz, 32GB Mem, a 4K 40" monitor, PreSonus Studio Live III Console as interface/controller. secondarily test on Reaper, Cakewalk, and S1 on Surface Pro 3 Win 10 (latest versions).
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Thank you Jpettit,
Based on what Noel pointed out, and by my confirmed test, here is yet another workaround: Re-open the file in RealBand and export it as MIDI, and the lyrics come through. It appears RealBand exports lyrics as "lyrics" instead of "text." This is great for Windows users, but sadly not for Mac (no RealBand for them) but the one of the other methods will be fine for them.
Last edited by ThomasS; 01/09/24 01:23 AM.
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Hi Thomas,
Nice demos that you created there, enjoyed listening to them. And great work everyone sorting out the lyrics problem. We'll investigate the lyrics export/import in Band-in-a-Box further. It would be great if the process of sending a MIDI file with lyrics to Synth V was as seamless as possible.
Andrew
PG Music Inc.
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Thank you, Andrew
In checking out how to make BIAB MIDI seamlessly work with Synth V, it would be great also to see why some people are having problems getting generated-harmonies (MIDI, not Audio) on to separate tracks in the exported MIDI file. The method I find sometimes works is to generate the harmony, then mute every track except the melody track, then Hit File>Save Special>MIDI>Type 1. Sometimes this will give you a MIDI file with separate tracks, and sometimes it does not, and I can't figure out why it is inconsistent. The method I find always works is to reopen the file in RealBand, which has the option, when creating MIDI harmonies, to assign each harmony part to a separate track. So RealBand is actually perfect in both its export of MIDI lyrics (not as text) as well as separate harmony tracks (needed by Synth V.)
I didn't post this issue here, because I already had a workaround, but after I posted the above demos of Synth V singing BIAB harmonies on other boards concerned with Synth V (Synthesizer V Forum, and VI-Control) several people said they bought BIAB just because of how well this feature works. But one user PM'd me and said he bought BIAB just for this purpose but couldn't get the separate tracks, and I told him about RealBand, and he said he used Mac which doesn't have a Mac version. I showed him another, more cumbersome, workaround, but it would be great if this also was quick and simple in BIAB.
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Hi Thomas, I'm not sure if you saw this... A few posts up I indicate how to make sure that BIAB's MIDI harmony is saved on separate tracks. When you select the "Type 1" file, click on the "Options" butt below "Type 1" and then make sure that the "Write harmony on separate tracks" box is activated. Below is the direct link to that post. https://www.pgmusic.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=794449#Post794449--Noel UPDATE: With the "All of me.MGU" file that you uploaded, I just soloed the Melody track and saved it as a Type 1 MIDI file with the "Write harmony of separate tracks" activated. The resulting Melody.mid file loaded the melody and all harmony tracks into Realband as separate tracks.
Last edited by Noel96; 01/10/24 12:10 AM. Reason: added update
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Thank you Noel, that solves the problem of separate tracks, and probably explains why sometimes it worked for me and other times not. I must have had it unchecked in one. So that is great, if MAC users don't have access to RealBand, then this will work for them, and also I find BIAB really fast if I just want this feature quickly to get back to Synth V.
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Also, there is an option when creating the MIDI to "write the harmony to the Melody track". If that is chosen, all the harmony will be put on MIDI Channel 4 and will be no good for Synth V. If you look at Notation Editor after creating harmony with the option, you will see all the notes in the melody. Doing this cannot be undone other by CTRL+Z (Edit >>Undo) immediately after it is done, so it pays to save a backup file before creating harmony in case something goes awry. ![[Linked Image - Only viewable when logged in]](https://www.pgmusic.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=download&Number=26992&filename=saving midi harmony as different tracks.jpg) So the bottom line... 1) DO NOT choose "Write harmony to Melody track" when choosing the harmony via ALT+F10 [Harmony >> Melody harmony (select)]. 2) Make sure the Type 1 save options are instructed to save the file with the harmony on different tracks. I'll pass this information onto the Development Team. I think that Synth V and other vocal synths will become very popular so the process to go from BIAB to a vocal synth using MIDI should be more straightforward.
MY SONGS...Audiophile BIAB 2025
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Thank you Noel, that makes it all clear!
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