Originally Posted by JohnJohnJohn
1) When you buy Synthesizer V Studio Pro do you get any of the voices or must you buy at least one voice database?
The voices are a separate product. You can use free voices, but they have restrictions. There are bundles of Studio Pro + voicebank that are available. I assume that's the "starter set" you're referring to.

If you want to do any serious work with Synthesizer, you'll want the Pro Studio and at least one voice database.

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2) If you get a "starter set", do you get enough to do anything useful?
Yes.

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3) Are the vocals stored similarly to RealTracks in snippets of analog audio files?
The vocals are sourced from an actual singer. But the underlying technology is a lot different.

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4) Are the individual words sung, recorded and stored, then used to assemble the vocals?
Sort of. They are sung, recorded, stored, disassembled into phonemes, and then used to train a neural network.

Most of the time, you'll just assign words/syllables to notes in SynthesizerV, and it will automatically convert it into phonemes. This will automatically be sent to the rendering engine, which will create the sung audio.

If you use the free version of SynthesizerV Studio, it'll answer a lot of your questions. You can work with one of the free voices, so there's no initial investment. I haven't used it recently, but it used to allow songs of any length, but limited access to advanced voice features such as vocal modes. I noticed that some of the free voices only allow 45 seconds of audio to be exported.

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5) If #4 is true is there any limitation on the number of different words each vocalist can sing in your song?
No, you can create any length word.

Most of the time you'll be entering words in English. You generally only need to use phonemes for homonyms, although you can cheat and do things like type "REED" when it pronounces "READ" as "RED".

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6) Is there one male vocalist and one female vocalist that would be considered general purpose? (That cover of Desperado with Hayden sounded pretty good!)
Yes, but there's a difference between "pretty good" and "a voice I like".

Although all the voices have the ability to sing in all the languages, some of them have strong accents. Others may be native English voices, but still have occasional accents.

For female voices, Solaria is an excellent native English voice for all-around use. She can be a bit intense. Natalie is one of my favorite voices - she's not as strong, but I think she better suits the style of song I write. I also quite like Weina, who is a bilingual singer.

For male voices, Kevin is probably the best choice. Haydn is good, but I think is voice is less versatile. Jun is good, but I find he's got more of a "theatre" than "pop" voice. Noa Hex has just recently been released by Audiologie, and he's got a very contemporary pop voice.

If you go to the Dreamtonics site and look in the store, all of the voices they sell have demo songs. If you look at the bottom of the page, you'll see "Audio Preview". Each singer has snippets of a variety of songs in multiple languages, in each of their vocal styles.

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7) Are there limits on what key each singer can sing in?
There's no limit to the key, but since they are based on actual singers, there are range limits, and you exceed those at your own peril. You can go beyond those limits, but if it gets too low, the voices will become very soft.

But that's what you're really asking, right? Depending on the song, some keys will work better than others. Good thing it's easy to change both in BiaB and SynthesizerV. laugh

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8) Can you use fx on the vocals such as the presets of izotope Nectar and do these cause artifacts or other issues?
You can treat them as ordinary vocals. I normally render the vocals out as .wav files and then work on them in my DAW.

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9) Does the license you purchase allow you to distribute and sell your songs without any special licensing or royalties?
It depends on which company's voices you're using. Dreamtonics and Eclipsed Sounds tends to have very free EULAs. Some of the other companies have more restrictive licenses.

Unfortunately, you'll need to read the EULAs to be sure.

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10) Do they typically do Black Friday sales? The current deal I am considering is Synthesizer V Studio Pro + Any Voice Database Bundle for $161
Not typically, but stranger things have happened.

-- David Cuny
My virtual singer development blog

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