Any Vocaloid users here (or anything similar)?

If you're thinking of trying out Vocaloid, you owe it to yourself to try out the free Plogue "Alter Ego" first. https://www.plogue.com/products/alterego/
I find the results with Alter Ego are very similar to Vocaloid, in some ways much better, but with way less work. I believe the current state of Vocaloid would allow more human-like results with a lot of editing and trial and error, but I could never get anything usable or useful and it was a frustrating experience (using Vocaloid 2). In the end, both products are capable of creating something human-like if used (very) deep in a mix or used for a vocoder style effect in electronic music (which is a much better fit, IMO). 

Just dug out my demo version of Volcaloid 4 - with the English Luka voicepack.
I have to say that just entering notes and words, the vocal quality is distinctly better than alterego - vocaloid (without any serious editing) sounds like a voice sung without any emotion, and heavily autotuned. Alterego still sounds robotic (using the free 'bones' voicepack).
However, the lack of VST makes Vocaloid much harder to work with.
I'm going to have to spend some time with vocaloid to try and understand what the various settings / tools do, and see if it can work for me.
I'm thinking that if I can get something close in vocaloid, I can then bring it into Sonar and use Melodyne to 'tweak' it some more.....

Hmmm £160 (ish) - that's not a bad price for both male and female libraries....
Certainly worth some more thought.....

Thanks bitflipper - that's really interesting (and impressive) - exactly why I started this thread - to find out what else is out there.
As you say, the articulations are a little limiting, but the sounds are very good......

Blue is really good. Also check out Ladies.

To me Blue is the best sounding, but it does take some work. Getting any reasonable approximation of the human voice singing is about the toughest thing to do. You need to play around with timing and legato of which blue has several. Fortunately Mike Greene who is Blue's creator is a great guy and very responsive. He also runs VI-Control these days so he's pretty easy to get a hold of.
 
This is a brief attempt I made a while ago. As the nice folks here will tell you I'm lightly skilled at best and you can do better, but this is an idea of a newbie using Blue.
https://soundcloud.com/bi..1969/amazing-grace-blue

OK, been doing more reading, watching videos, and testing / trialling.
Realivox Blue seems to be the closest/best for what I want to do, but as mentioned above (and on the demo video), it still doesn't have a complete set of sounds/vowels/phonemes, so it struggles to produce some words.
The demo video is very interesting where he changes the word structure; often putting the end consonant of a word on the beginning of another - that certainly improves some phrases. 
I guess it's a tool they requires a lot of practice to learn to get the best of it (and people say we should stop messing around with computers and take the time to learn to play a 'real' instrument 😀 - 'playing' a PC is just as hard, and requires just as much skill/practice - it's just different).
 
I totally get that the number of hours put into creating Realivox Blue must have been phenomenal, but I'm struggling to understand why they've gone on to produce a newer product (Ladies) with more voices but less syllables? From my perspective, I'd rather a single voice with more syllables......
 
Anyway, as always I appreciate the feedback and suggestions from here (without this thread I would never have known Realivox existed). Not sure if Blue will be my final purchase, or I'll wait to see what 'comes next', but it's interesting (and amazing) to see what is possible.
 
.....and my worry is if I get out the credit card, I won't be able to resist my rising urge to buy RealiBanjo as well 😀

You can use standalone . But It is an app for Cubase DAW.
Zero-G vocaloid pack
https://zero-g.co.uk