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Caveat: I haven't used ACE Studio, and I can't speak to the quality of the tool. If nothing else, it's interesting to see the changes they've made by listening to feedback. I figured since BiaB users are using synthetic voices, and it doesn't compete with BiaB, it's not really an advertisement. Mods can feel to disagree.  Joe Guo, the owner of ACE Studio , introduced himself on the VI-Control forum and wrote: I’m excited to engage in discussions about ACE Studio, music production, sound engineering, AI algorithms for music, and anything else related to these fields! Not surprisingly, people had thoughts about ACE Studio, and were happy to share them with Joe.  To his credit, Joe made a number of changes to ACE Studio and the website, including: - Adding a limited time rent-to-own option.
- Making the pricing easy to find on the website.
- Removing and updating deprecated documents.
- Added demos of the singers to the website.
The annual artist plan is $22/month, which works out to be $528 for a permanent license. On the other hand, at $38.30/month on the monthly plan, it comes out to $924 for a permanent license. Because it's a web-based solution, if they ever went out of business you'll not be able to continue using the tool. Joe wrote: We’re trying out the idea of a lifetime license to see if people really like it.
So, we launched a rent-to-own model. Basically, if you stay subscribed for 24 months, you’ll automatically get a lifetime license, with all future updates included.
It’s like a lifetime license, but with payments spread out over two years, and you have the flexibility to cancel if you need to.
We chose this model to offer the best of both worlds: a subscription option for those who just want to try it out, and a path to ownership for those who want to keep it long-term.
That said, I’m not entirely sure if this model will work out for us as a business, so it’s a bit of a test. We might decide to end the rent-to-own option in the future, which makes it a limited-time offer in a way. But don’t worry—if you’ve already started on the rent-to-own path, you’ll keep it for good.
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Thanks for posting this David! I've been following the conversation over at VI-Control.
One thing I would note is the two price points you mentioned are both for the Pro plan. One is the regular price and the other is the sale price. I was not clear as to whether that sale price would be honored for the full two years it would take to achieve a permanent license. I suspect the sale price may disappear shortly and the monthly will return to full price! If so, the $528 (which was already too steep for my needs) could go much closer to the $924!
They also offer a lower cost plan that is regularly $29/month but on sale for $16.58/month. The only difference I saw was 1 voice slot vs. 5 voice slots. I don't understand the tool well enough to know the impact of that. If I am only creating one voice at a time anyway could I just use the lower cost plan and generate each voice, one at a time? Why would I need 5 voice slots? Maybe that is a limitation I don't fully understand?
Finally, I'm glad you mentioned something that might not be immediately obvious... and that is they could go out of business and you lose all access to the tool and all of your investment. In the current business climate around AI and music I suspect they may be a desirable acquisition for a large corporation which could also completely change the terms of any lifetime license you might hold. But with that all said, it is not unheard of for tech to change or simply disappear entirely! I developed quite a few very successful Flash apps and Flash-based website enhancements back in the early 2000s and within a decade Flash was dead!
Thanks again for posting this and for being such a great resource for all things having to do with this synthetic vocal stuff!
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Thanks for pointing me to this. I see StefanoM is a part of this project. StefanoM is the author of my favorite VI sounds for vocalists. His contibution to this project may seal the deal for me.
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Thanks for pointing me to this. I see StefanoM is a part of this project. StefanoM is the author of my favorite VI sounds for vocalists. His contibution to this project may seal the deal for me. Hey Dan, I forget if you are a Synthesizer V user or not? I bought it and I am really loving it!
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One thing I would note is the two price points you mentioned are both for the Pro plan. One is the regular price and the other is the sale price. I was not clear as to whether that sale price would be honored for the full two years it would take to achieve a permanent license. I suspect the sale price may disappear shortly and the monthly will return to full price! If so, the $528 (which was already too steep for my needs) could go much closer to the $924! The "sale" price is the Annual plan price, where you pay for one full year instead of making monthly payments. Since you have the option of cancelling at any point on the monthly plan, you're offered a steep discount if you commit to a full year of service. They also offer a lower cost plan that is regularly $29/month but on sale for $16.58/month. The only difference I saw was 1 voice slot vs. 5 voice slots. I don't understand the tool well enough to know the impact of that. If I am only creating one voice at a time anyway could I just use the lower cost plan and generate each voice, one at a time? Why would I need 5 voice slots? Maybe that is a limitation I don't fully understand? That is my understanding as well. The 1 slot means that you only have one custom voice at a time. Creating a new custom voice replaces the old voice. They used to charge $300 per custom voice, but Joe said the figured out how to generate custom voices more cheaply, so they folded them into the plans. You can still add more custom voices, but it's an added cost. I didn't ask what that cost was. Finally, I'm glad you mentioned something that might not be immediately obvious... and that is they could go out of business and you lose all access to the tool and all of your investment. In the current business climate around AI and music I suspect they may be a desirable acquisition for a large corporation which could also completely change the terms of any lifetime license you might hold. But with that all said, it is not unheard of for tech to change or simply disappear entirely! I developed quite a few very successful Flash apps and Flash-based website enhancements back in the early 2000s and within a decade Flash was dead! It really depends on what sort of use case you're getting from the product. I'm in the process of moving to a new computer - not being able to run Vocoflex was the final straw. I've got a lot of voices, which makes my investment in SynthesizerV much higher than two years of a Pro annual subscription. I don't know how many high quality English voices ACE Studio currently has, but the demos I heard from earlier this year were pretty accented. However, with new voices and more training, things can change pretty quickly. As for how long ACE Studio will be around, I have no idea. And yes, it's not unusual for companies to make claims that permanent licenses are no longer valid. All they need to do is claim that somehow the next version is a "different product", and the old licenses are invalid. Been there, done that. While ACE Studio doesn't seem to have the same level of quality as SynthesizerV, they've got some cool features that SynthesizerV doesn't have. My guess is that they're using off the shelf libraries, which means that other motivated people can compete in the same market. But the cost of a permanent subscription is a lot cheaper than what I've already spend on SythesizerV voices. 
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Thanks for pointing me to this. I see StefanoM is a part of this project. StefanoM is the author of my favorite VI sounds for vocalists. His contibution to this project may seal the deal for me. Hey Dan, I forget if you are a Synthesizer V user or not? I bought it and I am really loving it! No, not a user. I had decided a year or so ago, not to go this direction. Fact is I can and do sing. I tried some AI demo voices in the past and did not feel they were that much of an improvement over what I could do and wanted to do. But this conversation over in VI forum did help me get a better picture of what is going and the demos were impressive. As I mention I have much of Stefano AI voices with Clara and I use them in my songs at times. So I am rethinking the whole thing now.
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Having just watched the ACE Studio promo video on YouTube, I think I would want a more realistic end product for the price they are charging. I know that SUNO is a different thing altogether, but anyone who has heard SUNO vocals will expect all synthetic vocals to sound that good and to my ears, SUNO is way ahead. I think that SUNO has created expectations which will reflect badly on ACE and make it difficult for them to charge almost $1k for the full licence.
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One thing I would note is the two price points you mentioned are both for the Pro plan. One is the regular price and the other is the sale price. I was not clear as to whether that sale price would be honored for the full two years it would take to achieve a permanent license. I suspect the sale price may disappear shortly and the monthly will return to full price! If so, the $528 (which was already too steep for my needs) could go much closer to the $924! The "sale" price is the Annual plan price, where you pay for one full year instead of making monthly payments. Since you have the option of cancelling at any point on the monthly plan, you're offered a steep discount if you commit to a full year of service. Ah yes, but they could still increase the price for year #2, right? But I guess they could conceivably lower the price for year #2 too!
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They also offer a lower cost plan that is regularly $29/month but on sale for $16.58/month. The only difference I saw was 1 voice slot vs. 5 voice slots. I don't understand the tool well enough to know the impact of that. If I am only creating one voice at a time anyway could I just use the lower cost plan and generate each voice, one at a time? Why would I need 5 voice slots? Maybe that is a limitation I don't fully understand? That is my understanding as well. The 1 slot means that you only have one custom voice at a time. Creating a new custom voice replaces the old voice. They used to charge $300 per custom voice, but Joe said the figured out how to generate custom voices more cheaply, so they folded them into the plans. You can still add more custom voices, but it's an added cost. I didn't ask what that cost was. Oh, I failed to fully understand this. So, once I create a voice that voice "lives" in slot #1 and I can then use it whenever I want to do a new song with it. Is that correct? And, if I wanted a different voice I'd lose what I have there currently to create a new one to use in a song, right? On the other hand, with the pro version I could have 5 different voices all saved and ready to use at any time. Do I have this right now? Do you know how long it takes to create a new voice?
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Having just watched the ACE Studio promo video on YouTube, I think I would want a more realistic end product for the price they are charging. I know that SUNO is a different thing altogether, but anyone who has heard SUNO vocals will expect all synthetic vocals to sound that good and to my ears, SUNO is way ahead. I think that SUNO has created expectations which will reflect badly on ACE and make it difficult for them to charge almost $1k for the full licence. That's only $528 if you do the Annual subscription, assuming prices don't change. But I agree - at this point, ACE Studio seems to be a couple of generations behind SynthesizerV, as the "tuning" of vocals has to me manual. And as you say, SUNU is a whole 'nother animal. It's learned not only the voice of singers, but expressive mannerisms as well. Unfortunately, these seem to be baked into the voice, so with SUNO, what you get is what you get.
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So, once I create a voice that voice "lives" in slot #1 and I can then use it whenever I want to do a new song with it. Is that correct? That is correct. And, if I wanted a different voice I'd lose what I have there currently to create a new one to use in a song, right? Correct. On the other hand, with the pro version I could have 5 different voices all saved and ready to use at any time. Do I have this right now? Yes, that's also correct. I see from the documentation that a Basic voice can also only be in a single language. When you train a model, you'll be presented with five versions, which you can test and select one of. They're basically the same model, with different amounts of training time. Because some models can start to degrade with over-training, you need to listen to the results to determine which model sounds best. They also say that if a singer has multiple modes (such as a "high" and "low" range), it makes sense to create two models instead of trying to combine them into a single model. So you may need multiple models if you're trying to capture an range of expression. For high-quality voices, you'll need 30 to 100 minutes of high-quality vocals. There are more details here. Do you know how long it takes to create a new voice? I can't see where they talk about training time, but my recollection was I had read that it took about 3-4 hours after submission before a model was ready.
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