Anybody here use Melodyne?

hmm...

Works great for us. You must not have taken the the time necessary to really learn how to use it. There is a learning curve on using the program adequately.

ORIGINAL: BluerecordingStudios

after what I see in SOnar 5 v vocal, Melodyne is piece of crap and after som e time nobody will use them

I don't think you will get many people to agree with you on this one. I have tried many pitch correcting apps and Melodyne is by far the best, if you use it right. Better than the supposed "industry standard" Autotune.

One thing you need to learn about Melodyne is that it's biggest weakness lies in it's tendancy to mis-identify some notes by one octave. Before you do anything else to the audio after you detected the pitch, you need to go into it's melody editor and listen very closely to the detected pitch and the original pitch, then make sure they line up. Some people say it doesn't matter, because it is all relative, but it most definately matters. The reason is because Melodyne creates "transition" zones based on the difference between two notes, that is, it slides in a realistic way between two notes. If one of those two notes is an octave off, the transition zone will be horribly mangled, even if the notes themselves sound fine. My guess is that this is probably the biggest source of artifacts people hear with Melodyne.

It's second biggest flaw is it's klunky integration with Sonar, and I agree V-Vocal has it beat there by a mile. But if you are willing to spend a little bit extra time and effort, you will get excellent results with Melodyne.

BTW, I am curious as to what exactly you are doing that is sounding so horrible. All voices (human and instrument) have a "natural range", and if you try to take a note outside of this range, it will sound unnatural, no matter how good the pitch shifting app. If I try to make my voice sound like a chipmunk, it will sound unnatural, no matter what I used to change the pitch.

SilkTone

taking the time to learn melodyne is well worth the effort.

I absolutely agree. As with any tool that alters sonic structure, the key is to use it correctly. Subtlety is a virtue

db

ORIGINAL: fif4lifefif
Is it just me, or does Melodyne suck? It doesn't work for me! If I do anything other than simply snapping vocal tracks to the nearest note, it messes up my track! It adds weird sounds, and the harmonies are horribly fake. Gah, am I doing something wrong????

The short answer is "Yes you are doing something wrong".

You are expecting Melodyne to just "do it" for you.

Like any piece of audio software it takes time and requires
patience to learn the techniques required.

It's not just 1 click and your song is now perfect.
There's an art to it.

I have found an easy way to work with Melodyne/Sonar. This way you don't have to export files, you don't have to hunt down file names, etc. And it is non-destructive, you don't have to constantly switch back and forth between Sonar and Melodyne, and it takes no additional CPU time (you will see what I mean once you understand my method). I wanted to solve all those problems I had and the method below solved all of them for me.

So here is a repost of what I posted in another thread once...

What I do is put the Melodyne bridge on both the track I want to edit as well as the master buss, then record that in Melodyne seperately to different tracks. Then I remove the bridge in the master bus and switch to Melodyne (not import, just switch to the app so it still works via the bridge). Then Play back both the track you recorded from the master buss as your backing track as well as the track you are editing. When I am done I freeze the track in Sonar, but with Fast Bounce disabled. Once the track is frozen, I can then start working on a different track. I save each track's project in Melodyne into a subfolder in the Sonar project, and call the Melodyne project the same as the track name in Sonar. Then it is easy to go back later, unfreeze the track, load the corresponding project in Melodyne, and tweak some more if I need to. Since I have Melodyne Cre8, it has the 8 track limitation, but this allows me to have 8 tracks for each Sonar track, which is more than I'll ever need. Well, 7 if you considder the backing track as well.

It sounds more complicated than it really is. It's pretty simple once you do it a few times.

SilkTone

Hm. I think the one-octave off problem is a big one for me. How can this be fixed? Thanks,
-Vince

ORIGINAL: fif4lifefif

Hm. I think the one-octave off problem is a big one for me. How can this be fixed? Thanks,
-Vince

When you see the one-octave off problem, stop and undo the Detect Melody process and try again with different melody detection settings. Sometimes just selecting a different preset is enough... like instead of the generic "Pitched Melody" preset for a male vocal... try the "Male Tenor" setting.

If that's still problematic, try adjusting the individual settings manually as described on page 127 of the Melodyne Manual <link>.

In particular, by narrowing the pitch range in the melody detection parameter pull-down menu to be as tight as possible to the pitch range of the performance, you should be able to eliminate the one-octave off problem completely.

Hope this is helpful.

Chiming in....

there was a little blurb about Melodyne in some recent issue of EQ magazine. I happened to catch it while sitting on the throne one day. A couple of recording engineers were discussing some big deal session they were involved in and talked a little bit about Melodyne (and Auto-tune). Their comment about went something like this:

Melodyne works great if the thing you're tryng to fix is in pretty good shape to begin with. I extrapolated from this:

These auto-tune programs probably work great as long as you're not expetcing miracles. A vocal track with only very minor flaws is easy to fix but if you just can't sing period, forget it.

I had a singer (I use that word loosely here) come in recently with a Lexicon floor unit that had pitch correction and other things. This guy was a screamer - and not very good. Here was expecting the LExicon to turn him into a good singer and it wasn't working. The fact that the unit worked as well as it did is a testament to Lexicon but what I noticed was that if you can't hit and hold anything resembling a note or pitch, the unit gets confused and just spits out digital garbage (garbage in garbage out right?).

The irony of it all - this stuff works best on good singers who probably don't need help in the first place

Yep, I used it just to nudge things to perfection. If you can't sing in the first place, you are going to have to work some major miracles. To me, it looks like melodyne could do it, but it will sound somewhat unnatural. For example, if you could not hold pitch on a note, or were off by multiple steps, not much gonna save you there.

ORIGINAL: krizrox

Chiming in....

there was a little blurb about Melodyne in some recent issue of EQ magazine. I happened to catch it while sitting on the throne one day. A couple of recording engineers were discussing some big deal session they were involved in and talked a little bit about Melodyne (and Auto-tune). Their comment about went something like this:

Melodyne works great if the thing you're tryng to fix is in pretty good shape to begin with. I extrapolated from this:

These auto-tune programs probably work great as long as you're not expetcing miracles. A vocal track with only very minor flaws is easy to fix but if you just can't sing period, forget it.

I had a singer (I use that word loosely here) come in recently with a Lexicon floor unit that had pitch correction and other things. This guy was a screamer - and not very good. Here was expecting the LExicon to turn him into a good singer and it wasn't working. The fact that the unit worked as well as it did is a testament to Lexicon but what I noticed was that if you can't hit and hold anything resembling a note or pitch, the unit gets confused and just spits out digital garbage (garbage in garbage out right?).

The irony of it all - this stuff works best on good singers who probably don't need help in the first place

The octave problem doesn't actually happen in Melodyne Uno and I was told by melodyne that it will be fixed in the full versions soon with an update. That is actually one of the reaons I just went with Uno.

ORIGINAL: GypsyJazz

ORIGINAL: fif4lifefif
Is it just me, or does Melodyne suck? It doesn't work for me! If I do anything other than simply snapping vocal tracks to the nearest note, it messes up my track! It adds weird sounds, and the harmonies are horribly fake. Gah, am I doing something wrong????

The short answer is "Yes you are doing something wrong".

You are expecting Melodyne to just "do it" for you.

Like any piece of audio software it takes time and requires
patience to learn the techniques required.

It's not just 1 click and your song is now perfect.
There's an art to it.

FORGET IT THEN! I'M SENDING MY S5 BACK.

I thought they HAD enabled the "platinum single one-click" option. Man, Cacewalk sucks for not doing this. How do they expect me to get rich and famous without any time, focus, work, and effort of my own if they don't include this.

S6 FEATURE REQUEST!!

And make sure to include an option box (preferably with a spinner-dial) for number of groupies at each tour stop.

For those interested, here is the direct response from Celemony. During this time I was trying both demos out so I went with uno because I didn't want to wait.

Dear Ryan,
Melodyne Uno already uses an improved detection technology than cre8
which would explain this (and of course this new detection will make
it into cre8 and the Studio Edition in the near future).
To get rid of the problem in cre8 you need to edit the detection by
selecting "edit definition" in the drop-down menu of cre8's
arrangement screen to the top left.
This will open the definition editor with the red background. Please
check all pitches here, since I'm sure that Melodyne ran into so-
called "octave detection errors". In other words smaller parts of the
detected file were put either an octave too high or too low. This can
cause the glitches you were talking about.