Nectar Review: Opinions

I DL'd the Nectar demo.... it runs in full function mode for 10 days.

So I popped it into a song I have been working on and played a bit with the vocal track.

After spending a bit of time... and I admit I did not spend a long time playing with it and exploring it...I will jump back in later, hopefully before the 10 days are up..... or maybe I'll just reset the system clock.....

What I did notice on the pitch correction, I heard a bunch of weird noises in the track as it was doing it's thing.....every time I ran the track I heard the noises.....and ...... I could not get it to show the blobs like Melodyne does for manual manipulation. maybe I didn't do something right.

The EQ presets: some sounded pretty decent ( I was choosing the country settings) but a number of them were simply too gimmicky. Sounding alot like a newbies attempt to hide a poor vocal performance behind tons of FX. I concluded that with a little bit of time and effort, you could easily set up the same EQ in Ozone. The GUI and the controls appeared to be identical to Ozone's handling of EQ.

The most concerning thing to me was the CPU that this thing ate up. Just having it in the project ran the normal CPU level from 12% to 15% running several Ozones, a bunch of default cake plugs, and Melodyne in the vocal track.....................to..... 25% to 30%  having removed Melodyne and replacing it with Nectar.  An easy doubling of CPU numbers for that ONE plug.  If this was my older lappy DAW, I'm thinking Nectar would have stopped it cold...or at least caused major popping and clicking and audio drops.

So far, I'm not too impressed with Nectar. If you already have Melodyne you have a sweet pitch correction plug. And if you have Ozone 3 or 4, I think it's easy enough to set up dedicated presets to get the EQ, loudness, reverb, and compression that you need for a vocal track. I have already done that in O3/4 and find it works well and Ozone is much lighter on the CPU than Nectar seems to be.


I will of course load it up and play with it again before I make a final determination as to thumbs up or thumbs down on this new software offering.


Your thoughts and observations?

I'm running Music Creator 4 as the host on a 32 bit OS.

Perhaps that's why I could not see the audio blobs.  I have a few hours until my next appointment so mI might log off here and load it up and play a bit.

Oops .... duplicate.  Sorry.

Hi, Herb,
 
I'm also in the process of testing it out, and for manual pitch correction, it says to make sure that you use the VST version for Sonar, and I'm guessing all Cakewalk products.  You may have inserted the DX version of the plugin instead of the VST version, which is what I also did.
 
Also, if you are using the plugin in "Tracking Mode", manual pitch correction is disabled to save CPU.
 
Hope this helps!
Bob