Posted by: "CHorr" chorr@btconnect.com colinhoho Wed Oct 4, 2006 2:44 pm (PST) > It works flawlessly on my G5 with Logic Pro too...... but if > anybody can > get an intelligible sentence out of the thing in less than a decade, > I'll be very surprised. If you invited a choir around to record, > filled > their mouths with large amounts of bread, then gagged them with a gag > which you could use to tow a truck, and recorded them with a mic > inside > a cardboard box, inside a bigger cardboard box, and EQ'd out > everything > over 200 Hz, oh, and asked them to sing in an obscure Albanian > dialect, > you would get very close to the "Wordbuilder". I should know by > now, but > this piece of software will be joining Vocaloid on my pile of > "software > that promises lots, costs a fortune, but is unusable". > Aren't guitars wonderful ? :-) Unusable indeed. That's shamefully unfair to a phenomenal product. With all due respect, you're totally missing the library's strengths - which is fine, but then I have to ask why on earth you would have bought it. Vocaloid?! Come on. Mic inside cardboard box?! What?! How would you have gone about it? You don't just up and sample a choir and come up with the product they came up with. First they had to research linguistics to figure out all the syllables we use. They then programmed a sophisticated utility program (Word Builder) to construct phrases, complete with the ability to stretch syllables and adjust their envelopes. It's really not all that tough once you get the hang of it. Finally they went out and recorded it all really well. EWQLSC is the state of the art right now, and I don't just like it, I absolutely love it. It can do a lot of things really well, but of course you have to work around its limitations. How could there not be things it also can't do. If you think you're going to pull of Mozart's Requiem with a sample library, well, of course you won't like it. Yet even then it's still beyond me how anyone could sit down and play that library once and not get hooked. It's such a stunningly gorgeous sound even without Word Builder. I just don't get it. What it does well is produce a huge, lush choir sound. Even if you use vague Latin phrases (which they have as presets) rather than your words, the notes move around in a human way. It's way ahead of the standard ooh and aah choirs. You can tweak a lot and make it sing your words, but of course it's not easy to perfect them. And even then you don't want to have it totally exposed. If you combine it with orchestral samples, it works really well. So it's not about getting it to sing intelligible sentences. And having said all that, you have to see Nick Phoenix' video demos on the Soundsonline site. He can make it sound pretty real. Nick Batzdorf, editor/publisher Virtual Instruments Magazine - the world of softsynths and samplers www.Virtualinstrumentsmag.com 1-877 VImagzn (846-2496) 818/905-9101, cell 590-9101

Nick Batzdorf wrote: > EWQLSC is the state of the art right now, and I don't just like it, I > absolutely love it. It can do a lot of things really well, but of > course you have to work around its limitations. How could there not > be things it also can't do. If you think you're going to pull of > Mozart's Requiem with a sample library, well, of course you won't > like it. > > Yet even then it's still beyond me how anyone could sit down and play > that library once and not get hooked. It's such a stunningly gorgeous > sound even without Word Builder. I just don't get it. Well Nick, that's a fairly strong endorsement, but one of the joys of life, and music, is that it is subjective. And I stand by what I said - I didn't listen once, I gave it 3 x 2 hour sessions, including following one of the video demos exactly. I A/B'd the basic "instrument" against Spectrasonics "Symphony of Voices". (It lost) And although the interface (wordbuilder) is easy and intuitive to operate, the end result, to use your words, has to be "around the limitations". For me, the limitations exceed the time-demand to produce the result. So thanks for your observations, I hope the programme is a big success, and evolves into something brilliant. Colin Orr http://www.janus-music.com (with some experience of these things)