Beeps, I'm not in the right place to really comment as I'm stuck on a lappy that doesn't paint the right picture. But based on what I heard....here is what I CAN say. Will listen again on better speakers when I can...try to send me an mp3 when you're ready....192kb at the minimum.
Female vocals are hard depending on the voice...especially this lady because she almost sings in a falsetto fashion without much "push" to her delivery. Vocals like hers are always going to be a bit of a challenge because they are so thin. When you try to thicken them up, they walk on something. Trust me....I know all too well. LOL! You just have to ride the fader and automate the best you can while compressing to keep her in check.
Robotic drums: This is one of the downfalls of programming or using loops that are created from being programmed as opposed to when someone on a V-Drums kit creates the midi loops. Huge difference. That said, anytime you get a kick drum going nuts like that, unless you use a major drum module like BFD, Superior or EZD2, you are going to have to really tweak the drums. The reason for the robotics.....well, there are a few. I'll list some.
1. Like I said above, programmed vs. played for real.
The fix: You can hi-lite the kick drum track via piano roll and run a "vary velocity" CAL file. This will allow you to set a starting point (lowest velocity hit) midi velocity as well as an ending (highest allowed) velocity note. This will make things more realistic. But you have to be careful or you can mess things up. So clone the midi track and experiment this way you don't lose the original. What I like to do after cloning is, I select the kick drum and then "process' then "scale velocity" set 127 and 127. This jacks the kicks all the way up through the entire song. From there, keep the kick notes hi-lited, select process, run CAL and look for the vary velocity CAL file. Load it up and it will ask you questions. Set the lowest at something like 100 for starters, the highest at 127 and execute it. See how things sound there...it may help quite a bit. If it doesn't, undo and try again. OR....you manually experiment with each kick drum note and set them until they sound right.
2. The drum module selected: This really makes a difference. Though drum modules like Session Drummer and even EZD 1 and Addictive Drums are good....they lack the samples needed to sound realistic. When someone uses BFD 2 or 3, they are drawing from an insane sample pool to where you will NEVER get a robotic hit because you have like too many possibilities within the sample pool to get the same hit twice. The same hits repeating is what causes roboticism (as I like to call it) as well as same note velocities. If you saw a midi of a real drummer actually playing, you would understand things way better. Everything from ghost notes to human error make a midi drum sound more realistic. But the drum module REALLY makes the difference too. EZD 1 failed at this even with their expansion packs. But EZD2 is much better. So far I've not encountered any robotic stuff with EZD2. BFD 2 and 3 as well as Superior 2 are all perfect and will not robotisize when playing them live and are easier to make sound good when programming or using loops.
3. The speed of the piece: If you listen to break beat stuff done by drummers on a real kit, even real drums can sound fake when something is so fast. Certain double kick passages will just always have that sense of "fake" no matter what you do if the part is fast enough. Add in the 2 things I mentioned above and you can really have disadvantages in how real your drums sound.
4. Samples selected: Some drum modules do have a nice array of samples to draw from within their sample pools.....however, the sample you like may particularly be a bad one for faster material. Some toms sound great with single hits....throw in a fast fill and they sound like Simmons drums. Some snares are insane....until you do a snare roll. So you have to take all this stuff into consideration. You're always going to have limits and disadvantages until you can really understand what happens with instruments for real. Like I say....if you saw what a real drum midi looked like from someone that played say, a part of your song vs. what you have programmed....you'd probably scratch your head and say "huh?!?!" It looks much different than what gets programmed. That said, I don't expect you or anyone else to go out and buy a real kit or a V-Drums kit. My reason for bringing up the above is to explain what makes something real and what makes something more fake than it could or should be.
Next, and this is just a personal observation......to me, the lead guitar passages could be a little warmer. I come from the camp of having my rhythm guitars have a bit more cut and presence in the mix so they cut through. But I always low pass the high end out of my solos because excessive treble in a solo makes the solo (to me) a deterrent from the song due to harsher tones. Again, this is subjective and is just me and my personal take....but 'd warm up the solo sections. You want them to lash out, but they don't have to be so crispy in my opinion. That's one thing my lappy is good for....identifying high end. :)
Rhythms sound good....I like those tones. I can't hear any bass for obvious reasons....and I wasn't hearing anything too drastic with the widening you used on the vocals. That said, you do not want to put all vocals on the same vocal bus. Lead vocals and backing vocals should be processed differently. From the effects used to the eq/compression and everything else. I could have sworn you mentioned one vocal bus with the widening on there for all vox. If that is the case, change this.
Keep in mind, widening will only make a difference when you are using stereo effects and the widening should be used AFTER the special effects like verb, chorus, flange, phaser or anything special like that. Putting a widener on a track that just has compression or eq will do nothing and could even phase the vocals making them sound like @ss and you don't want that.
I like to process my vocals in the manner in which you did yours, but I do mine right on the track. Instead of creating buses for effects to my vocals, I literally process right on the track except for reverb in some cases. Why do I do this? So I can put a light widener at the end of my vocal chain. This allows my vocal to maybe spread from down the center to 25L/25R roughly. This gives the vocal a little more size....but is driven by the effects that are on the track. Instead of a widener, I may use a HAAS delay and eq it.....so many things you can do here. I just did a really cool version of Deep Purple's "Perfect Strangers" I can send you to show you how my voice sounds in a situation like that with the light widening and effects. Remember....less is more. It's the way you go about the "less" that makes it "more". :)
I'll listen on better stuff as soon as I can. I've been so busy with everything that I decided to do nothing from Saturday until tomorrow. LOL! I missed my girl and she lives with me.....go figure. Had a show Friday, worked Saturday morning for an emergency client and when I was done said....let's go wine tasting. I'm still tasting. Hahaha! So I'll be back to work tomorrow if you decide to send me anything. Talk soon and hope some of this helps for now.
-Danny