wax&wires

VisualVox Polyphonic 0.9 – Should Melodyne Be Worried?

It’s been only a few weeks since NAMM 2009 and Celemony’s long-awaited announcement of Melodyne Editor; the first product to feature DNA, or Direct Note Access, for polyphonic audio manipulation. Anxious customers are still sitting on their hands for Editor to hit store shelves, and now a small independent plug-in operation has released VisualVox Polyphonic 0.9.

As made clear by the 0.9 version number, the product is still in testing phases, but still shows promise as a much more economic alternative to Melodyne’s stable operation. VisualVox has the price set at just under $40 USD, and has boasted claims to some of the same features as its more renown competitor.

From VisualVox:

The time has come to announce the release of the world’s first published polyphonic tone manipulation software. The dream of musicians to isolate single notes out of chords and so to manipulate most forms of recorded audio has come true on the 20th of January 2009.

• Change chords or single wrong notes in polyphonic recordings
  • To fit pieces into your composition that otherwise would not have been accessible due to their key
  • To creatively play around with recorded audio like with a midi instrument – it will play your musical ideas by a click but it still sounds like the real instrument
• Isolate the natural harmonics of instruments, manipulate them, take your instruments under the magnifying glasses to understand their sound
• Create real sounding harmonizations, i.e. make chords out of monophonic parts of audio
• Correct intonation problems of any instrument or voice while keeping the formants as they are
• Create artificial vibrato, stretch the formants, rearrange melodies, draw frequency curves with your mouse to access monophonic and polyphonic audio in a way it has never been possible before

Their site lists the bugs and glitches very plainly on the front page. They also have some audio examples posted, which proved more inconclusive than anything else to me.

Anybody running an Intel Mac with a VST host can give it go here. Be sure to leave some thoughts below if you have any.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 7th, 2009 at 4:20 am. It is filed under wires and tagged with autotune, melodyne, plugins, visualvox. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.