Anderton
I thought V-Vocal was brilliant, but as Windows and SONAR progressed, and Roland stopped maintaining it, it became increasingly flaky. When I started using Melodyne, I kicked myself for not having done it sooner. If nothing else the sound quality was much more natural. Remember, V-Vocal was released over 10 years ago, so it was in design before that.
 
However, the bad news is that to do everything V-Vocal did you really need the Editor version of Melodyne. That means a paid upgrade. The good news is Melodyne does it so much better. The Pitch Modulation tool alone is invaluable, and the percussion algorithm is fantastic for leveling out vocals without using dynamics processing.
 
And the polyphonic pitch correction! What really sold me on Melodyne was when I did a slide guitar part and the slide landed on the right note but at an angle, so half the notes were sharp and half the notes were flat. Melodyne fixed it without altering the slide itself. Messed with my mind...

I spent about 20 min searching and couldn't find the price of the upgrade to Editor except some high priced ones at Sweetwater that maybe doesn't take in account owning Platinum. Can you tell me how much it is? And if it's a one time charge or continuous charges?
 
Also on further testing I found that it was only one CWP that was crashing with V-Vocal and a few things fixed it. One was either freezing my Ivory piano or disconnecting it or disconnecting  Superior Drummer or archiving most of the audio tracks. This is strange because it appears to be a memory thing and I’m running 64 bit Plat using only 4.6 Gigs of RAM. Lots of extra memory.
 
 But I found something that really fixed it:
utilities – change audio format – choose 24 bit. it changes whole project to 24 bit. So currently it appears I’ve found a workaround for the next time V-Vocal wants to crash, yet I’m still interested in  Melodyne and maybe will dive in at some point.
 
 

You can pry V-Vocal from my cold, dead fingers.
 
And in my opinion, there is no more reason for it to become "flakey" over time than there is for the Sonitus:fx DXi to do so. And they still work fine.

stickman393
You can pry V-Vocal from my cold, dead fingers.
 
And in my opinion, there is no more reason for it to become "flakey" over time than there is for the Sonitus:fx DXi to do so. And they still work fine.

Yes I agree. I've gotten used to all the workarounds. Check my last post for tips when something does go wrong with it.  If you do importing of files then if things go haywire use this fix:
utilities – change audio format – choose 24 bit. it changes whole project to 24 bit.
 
if you record your vocals live then you may not run into these problems. Hopefully I can now use 2016.08 with this workaround

stickman393
You can pry V-Vocal from my cold, dead fingers.
 
And in my opinion, there is no more reason for it to become "flakey" over time than there is for the Sonitus:fx DXi to do so. And they still work fine.

Cakewalk owns the code to the Sonitus:fx, and I think they've been tweaked from time to time to maintain compatibility. Also remember that V-Vocal has three DLLs: Cronus.dll, VpEnc.dll, and VpSoloDec.dll. DLL stands for "dynamic link libraries" and although I don't know the specifics about these, if there are dependencies with other DLLs, conflicts can arise. For example if a dependent DLL is overwritten, fixed, removed, or upgraded, all bets are off.
 
If you want to know more, here's the Wikipedia entry for dependency hell. I'm not sure if that's the issue with V-Vocal, but it seems likely...IOW how V-Vocal performs at this point depends on what else is going on with your machine.
 
I was told one of the reasons Cakewalk found Melodyne so attractive as a replacement was because support calls about V-Vocal had gone through the roof, and given that Cakewalk didn't own the code, it wasn't going to be maintained by Roland, and DLL issues are so system-specific, there really wasn't much they could offer as a solution.

Bristol_Jonesey
...you can mitigate a lot of problems by following a few simple rules:

1. Only EVER work in short clips of a couple of bars.
2. Before working on a single clip, bounce it to itself (bounce to clip)
3. Make sure the signal is at a healthy level
4. Make sure the signal is free from noise
5. "Top & Tail" both ends of the clip

 
I stick to this procedure myself and it seems to work. V-Vocal has not crashed on me for years.

Anderton
Cakewalk owns the code to the Sonitus:fx, and I think they've been tweaked from time to time to maintain compatibility. Also remember that V-Vocal has three DLLs: Cronus.dll, VpEnc.dll, and VpSoloDec.dll. DLL stands for "dynamic link libraries" and although I don't know the specifics about these, if there are dependencies with other DLLs, conflicts can arise. For example if a dependent DLL is overwritten, fixed, removed, or upgraded, all bets are off.
 
If you want to know more, here's the Wikipedia entry for dependency hell. I'm not sure if that's the issue with V-Vocal, but it seems likely...IOW how V-Vocal performs at this point depends on what else is going on with your machine.
 
I was told one of the reasons Cakewalk found Melodyne so attractive as a replacement was because support calls about V-Vocal had gone through the roof, and given that Cakewalk didn't own the code, it wasn't going to be maintained by Roland, and DLL issues are so system-specific, there really wasn't much they could offer as a solution.

Thanks for the explanation. I remember Cronus.dll as being something that we'd disable in plugin manager. Can that affect V-Vocal?
 
Craig do you know how much the upgrade is to Melodyne Editor? At Sweetwater it's $400. Yet I thought we'd go through Cakewalk and get a break.

gmp
 
Craig do you know how much the upgrade is to Melodyne Editor? At Sweetwater it's $400. Yet I thought we'd go through Cakewalk and get a break.

The current price to upgrade from all versions of Melodyne Essential (the one bundled with SONAR) is $399 on the Celemony site. There have been sales, and some third party sellers may have lower prices. You don't buy it through Cakewalk.

The current price to upgrade from all versions of Melodyne Essential (the one bundled with SONAR) is $399 on the Celemony site.

The update (essential > editor 4) price on celemonys store is 299,00 EUR, which should $336,00 today.

Once you pay the price for Melodyne, do they keep charging you every year? Or do they give you updates for free?

Celemony released Melodyne 4 this year, it is a paid upgrade for all versions other than Essential. Updates between versions are free. IIRC, they occasionally have sales which reduce the upgrade price around 50%.