Seth Kellogg [Cakewalk]
 
Nope, all fixes came from Japan. 
Our move to ARA and Melodyne was done well before we left Roland. V-Vocal was already on it's way out. That's all I really know about the issue.

Thanks for that information. So Roland did own the code - not some third party - and just decided it wasn't worth pursuing. Seems like a waste of a good start. 
 
Was the TTS-1 a similar scenario? By that, I mean developed in-house at Roland and never touched again? The datestamp on the DLL is 2010 and the internal version is 1.0.2, so it's had at least one fix release since it was first bundled with SONAR in 2004. But after 10 years it still can't handle 88.2.
 

For some reason I have a hard time conceptually unifying GM soundsets with the demands of someone who wants to run at 88.2 :)
But that's neither here nor there.

Yes I remember Roland had a keyboard that did all this stuff and more, I always wanted them to make that into a VST, oh well.
 
http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/may03/articles/rolandvsynth.asp
 

bitflipper
Serious question for Craig...I doubt you know the answer, but I'm sure you know people who do.

 
Right on the first count, maybe not on the second one...it was developed a long time ago by Roland, and I never really had an "in" there.
 
Roland invented a technology called "Variphrase" which I believe was the basis of V-Vocal; VV was a spinoff from that technology. Regardless of the potential VV had, Auto-Tune ruled the world and it may have been a situation where it was too difficult to dislodge the long-time entrenched leader in pitch correction technology. 
 

Could V-V have been the product of some one-man shop who decided to go elsewhere?

 
I don't know, but I highly doubt it. I'm pretty sure Variphrase was genius Roland engineers doing their thing.

I know enough about Melodyne to know it is a remarkable piece of software.  My kid used V-Vocal and swore by it, when I showed him Melodyne with DNA a few years ago (prior to being packaged with SONAR), he was blown away.
 
Albeit, it isn't the easiest software to learn but if you need to do audio surgery, I don't know of a tool that comes close to what it can do (maybe AUTO TUNE before DNA).
 
That being said, I want my LOTUS 123 back.... can't do nearly all the tricks in EXCEL that I used to be able to do. 
 
RexRed... watch the tutorials on Celemony web site... they will give you tons on insight on what the program can and can't do.  It is quite amazing and the fact that it was free with X3 was amazing to me.
 
Jim
 
 
PS - it comes free with Studio One 2 as well (the pro version at least)

At least for now, anyone with X3 who had an earlier version with V-Vocal installed has the luxury of using both and not having to decide between one or the other. So I think a productive direction for this thread would be defining which tasks each does best, or equivalently.
 
For example, I think Melodyne works really well for doing Automatic Double Tracking-type effects, and I wrote an article for the Cakewalk blog about this application.
 
I wrote another article for the Cakewalk blog about using Melodyne to create harmony lines. Both these techniques work with Essential; you don't need Editor. 
 
Finally, there's a song on my YouTube channel that has all the harmony and ADT parts done with Melodyne Essential (this was before I upgraded to Editor) - there was only one recorded vocal part, everything was derived from that. I did not get equally good results when trying to do the same thing with V-Vocal.
 
 

V-Vocal's ancestor. It wasn't a pitch-correction device, but you could generate harmonies with it.

My main man:
 

Nice one Mike! I recognize that guy! My favorite is "so you can do interesting things in Skype conferences." haha

RexRed
I am gong to try out melodyne 3 editor and I will get back to you on if I like it, or not.

I for one am on the edge of my seat.