robert_e_bone
Melodyne proclaims that it can NOT isolate without the individual tracks.
Just to be clear (and I think we are clear), in my present quixotic adventure, I am only planning to use Melodyne on this noisy vocal track. The rest is all MIDI at this stage.
I got most of the noise out of it using R-Mix and the noise gate. If Melodyne perceives some of the remaining noise as notes, I should be able to easily delete those "notes".
We'll see. I can't get to this until Tuesday.
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On edit, I installed the trial of Melodyne. I was eventually able to get everything hooked up to insert Melodyne as a VST effect. I transferred some of that vocal track into Melodyne. It processed it as expected, But the resulting graph was nothing like their nice clean videos. It plotted the various sung notes, but it didn't seem to have enough "meat" on each note for me to actually do any editing. I could move stuff around in time, but I couldn't figure out how to do any of the other editing that looked so simple in the video.
I will give Melodyne the benefit of the doubt in this case because I started with a rather noisy file and cleared out most of the noise with R-Mix. In doing so, I may have killed some of the overtones that Melodyne needs to identify notes correctly.
I will try it on some other cleaner WAV files to see if it does any better. At this point, I'd say they produce a great video and tell a great story, but the reality? not so much. I hope I change my opinion after working with some other files, because I really want to believe this tool is the real deal.
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On second edit, let me complete the record re" Melodyne. I tried it on a cleaner instrumental track. The "blobs" look a lot more like what the videos show, but I have not figured out how to do the advanced editing that looks so easy in the video. I did some simple pitch corrections, time ****s and stretching, and some copy/paste of notes to make harmonies that were not in the original file, so that is all pretty cool. HOWEVER, it keeps crashing SONAR. They do provide a list of tips for using with SONAR< so I guess I'll need to go through each one of those. My biggest problem is that it seems that Melodyne is latching on to my Presonus interface and never releasing it. That forces me to reboot and then go back into my SONAR project that fix up the routing that gets botched up each time.
If I can get that problem fixed, I'll probably buy the tool. Otherwise it is too much of a PITA.
This sort of reminds me of all those programs that promised to scan printed sheet music and turn it into perfectly notated Finale files. I never found a single case where it was faster to scan (and then repair all the stuff the scan got wrong,) than it would have been to just key in the entire score from scratch.
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One final edit so as not to leave bad information hanging. My problems are resolved by getting everything under ASIO drivers. I wasn't aware that the Presonus driver already supported ASIO. I had tried to configure ASIO4All when I discovered it was not necessary.
There is definitely a learning curve with Melodyne, and the VST interface is not what I would call smooth or intuitive, but once one understands how to make that work, there are unbelievable capabilities with Melodyne. It seems like it is best to not leave Melodyne on an active track very long. Get in, do your edits, then bounce the track to memorialize the Melodyne changes and get Melodyne out of the way. It is not just for pitch and time fixes. You can use it to add harmonies, bring out harmonics, and all sorts of other stuff, and you can even convert audio tracks to MIDI, if that is something you want to do. I could see converting a vocal track to MIDI, then running that MIDI through a guitar to double the vocal or something like that.