Emvoice One $199

Web emvoiceapp.com Format PC/Mac

Taking on Yamaha’s famous Vocaloid, Emvoice One is a virtual vocalist that currently offers a single female singer – Lucy – with more to come in the future. A cloud-based system, the plugin does its thing by constantly pulling multisamples down from gigabytes of phonemes on the Emvoice servers. This, of course, means you have to be online to use it. The interface looks like a standard MIDI piano roll, with a timeline mirroring that of the host DAW. Notes are drawn in groups to create monophonic phrases, and lyrics are simply typed in, with each contiguous note triggering the next syllable in the phrase. Vibrato and glissando are easy to program, and alternative pronunciations (and entirely new words) can be built by stringing phonemes together manually. As for the all-important voice emulation, while Lucy sounds unmistakably computer generated, and no one’s going to mistake her for the real thing, she’s certainly the most realistic virtual singer we’ve heard yet, and it’s not at all difficult to coax relatively expressive and nuanced performances out of her.

There are some obvious niggles, though, mostly relating to Emvoice’s cloud-based architecture. As a consequence of the remote processing, you can’t edit notes or text during playback, and there’s no live auditioning of notes as they’re moved up and down the keyboard. And although the uploading and downloading of data is very fast (on our 70mbps connection, the delay was unnoticeable), the whole online requirement is just… uncomfortable. What happens if the servers – or the company! – go down? No, we very much prefer to actually own the software we’ve paid for, so hopefully a locally stored option is in the pipeline. And on the subject of paying for it, $199 is a lot of money for something you’re unlikely to actually feature in a track.

Nonetheless, as a tool for laying down guide vocals or creating openly artificial voice tracks, Emvoice is impressive…

n7/ 10n