Review of SymphonicChoirs by East West/Quantum Leap

[admin]

Review of SymphonicChoirs

can be found here:

http://audio-pro-central.com/reviews/re ... choirs.htm

Excerpt:

If they had stopped there, we would have a nice collection of choirs and that would be it. But the programmers went further and took on an incredible initiative. What if you could make the choir sing the words you input? That is what the Word Builder does. It allows you to type in words, which are translated into MIDI commands which call up consonants and vowels as they are needed, assembles them into words at the required pitch and sends them to your sequencer. This is nothing less than revolutionary. Its also a lot of midi controller and sample manipulation behind the curtain, and yes, it takes a big bite out of your CPU. Those interested in SC should carefully consider...

Get a Price on Symphonic Choirs

[popnoodles]

This software DOES NOT DO WHAT IT SAYS. You cannot simply type words in and hear a choir sing what you type. Even after spending time tweaking each phonetic there is no way to get this product to make the realistic sounding choir sing realistic words.

If you want something that can produce the sound of a dyslexic choir singing noises it is for you. If you want to your audience to be able to understand the words, hire a real choir. The demos are all in Latin so that the unintelligible words sound real. A great idea badly executed.

This is an awful product that simply does not do what it claims.

Furthermore, customer service is abominable. Support is not support it's sarcasm. Utterly utterly disappointed with this product and the customer service. I would recommend neither the product or the company.

[davidroseberry]

I don't think it's purpose was to actually be a stand alone instrument. Rather something that could be mixed with orchestra, beats, what have you....
Once you've done that things become a lot more believable. But I don't think we ever will see a piece of software that will sound anything anything close to a real choir.
My 2 cents...

But I will agree with what you say about their service....

[Tweak]

Its such a great concept. And it does work, sort of. I wish it could be more clear and distinct, but its not. Its a massive keymap switcher with samples of vowels and consonants, uniquely strung together as you type in words.

Expectations should to be on the low end. These are not computer modeled voices, but thousands of samples being switched in and out. So it is going to sound smeared. But behind a group of real life vocalists this can create nice backdrops.

I got the "play" upgrade not long ago. I will say I am disappointed. The advertisement led me to think, wrongly, that the word builder was now integrated with the plugin. I interpreted that to mean there was now one plugin that did the wordbuilding and choir generation. Wrong! To my surprise, there was no integration of the two. I guess there are many meanings of the word "integrated". The WordBuilder still has to be setup outside Logic which makes it less than stable here. I thought, oh, I'll just do choir projects in Cubase 5, where the word builder shows up as a midi plugin. Wrong! Play crashes Cubase 5 on my mac. To me, this is unacceptable.

[mcatalao]

Hi, Tweak.

Full integration of word builder will only be available in the new version of play i think. To use World builder in Logic, you have to use a midi router.

The choirs are great, and sound really nice. The world builder could be perfected a little, and i wonder if it could be done with other technologies, like vocoding (i think that roland vocalizer does that, and it is way more natural). Anyway, just a curiosity, the World builder was the final project of a Portuguese IT student from Aveiro Engineering Faculty.

[Tweak]

4 months later. No change. Cubase still crashes here! Maybe they should hire the guy who wrote the program?

[mcatalao]

Tweak,

It's a strange issue, though. Cubase doesn't crash on PC with Play. I have to treat it nicely though... I'm used to change patches when playing in Reason/Record, and if you do that in Play/Cubase it's a definite crash.

Other than that, on my pc things are smooth.

Did you try that midi bridge option?

[Tweak]

Tweak,

It's a strange issue, though. Cubase doesn't crash on PC with Play. I have to treat it nicely though... I'm used to change patches when playing in Reason/Record, and if you do that in Play/Cubase it's a definite crash.

Other than that, on my pc things are smooth.

Did you try that midi bridge option?

Did not try, not sure what the midi bridge is. Play works fine in Logic, but setting up the word builder is a PITA. In Cubase Choirs used to work really well with the word builder, which ran as a midi plugin. But that was before Play.

[mcatalao]

Tweak,

In cubase and PC (Win XP 64/32) it just as you said, the world builder is a midi plugin.
I know for other threads you also have a PC based Daw, i truly advise you to test Play in Cubase and Windows.

This "midi bridge" thing is something i read it in Play manual.