On visiting Yamaha's site, I read the follwing snippet in the Features section
--snip--
"singing articulations" (collections of voice snippets, such as syllables and snippets of vocal expression variations, like vibrato) needed to reproduce vocals, are collected from custom-produced recordings of professional singers and put into a database after conversion into frequency domains. To synthesize vocal parts, the system retrieves data consisting of voice snippets, applies pitch conversion, then splices and shapes them to form the words of a song as typed by the user. As this processing is done at the frequency-domain level, pitch can be easily changed according to the specified melody, and the voice snippets can be spliced in a way that reproduces smooth-flowing words. For example, "sai" of "saita"is produced by using two snippets "sa" and "ai". Because the timbre of the vowels "a" and "ai" are usually different to each other, if these sounds were simply spliced together they would not sound right to the listener. To solve this problem, smooth processing of the splicing facility within the frequency domain is carried out, resulting in a smoother vocal.
--snip--
From this, I gather that the synthetic "voice" of the program is constructed by linking together samples of vowels etc provided by an actual singer?
What if we could harvest samples from a dead singer (vocal-only tracks from a studio master etc). Couldn't we then make a dead singer "sing" again? New songs? The Elvis comeback single of '04?
I downloaded the first "Leon" sample on Yamaha's site, and it sounded very convincing.
I don't know why people on this board are bagging WMA. To my ears it's superior to MP3 in the compression/quality stakes. I'm real fussy about how my music sounds, too
I did a test the other day encoding some music files to different formats and rates.
A.WMA file encoded at 160 kbps sounds as good as an MP3 encoded at 192 kbps or above! You only have to try it on your computer.
I think a lot of folks don't change the setting in Windows Media Player from the default 64 kbps encoding rate.
I have a Creative CD/MP3 player that plays both MP3's and WMA's. You get far more music files on a CD in WMA format with no (to my ears) loss of quailty.
eg, One More Robot by The Flaming Lips encoded with LAME at 192 kbps creates a file size of 7,021 KB. The same song encoded into WMA at 160 kbps creates a file size of 5,892 KB with better quality sound.
I read that the BEST lossy format is probably.MPC by MusePack, though it's not supported by any hardware player.
I mainly used the real player to sample musical snippets from over at amazon.com. However now (at least when using Internet Explorer), Amazon has employed it's own Music Sampler which, for me, doesn't require rebuffering every couple of seconds like Reals used to do. (Yes, Amazon still has samples in Real and Windows Media format, but this new sampler is so much better). I don't think I'll be using Real much any more.
Also, I remember a while back I was trying to install a player which played the old.viv video files. I found out that Real had bought the format, and in order to install their.viv player, I had to wade through pages of porn. I eventually installed a program called VivTV instead, written by a guy called Allen Cheng which admirably did the job.
Slashdot Mirror
On visiting Yamaha's site, I read the follwing snippet in the Features section
--snip--
"singing articulations" (collections of voice snippets, such as syllables and snippets of vocal expression variations, like vibrato) needed to reproduce vocals, are collected from custom-produced recordings of professional singers and put into a database after conversion into frequency domains. To synthesize vocal parts, the system retrieves data consisting of voice snippets, applies pitch conversion, then splices and shapes them to form the words of a song as typed by the user. As this processing is done at the frequency-domain level, pitch can be easily changed according to the specified melody, and the voice snippets can be spliced in a way that reproduces smooth-flowing words. For example, "sai" of "saita"is produced by using two snippets "sa" and "ai". Because the timbre of the vowels "a" and "ai" are usually different to each other, if these sounds were simply spliced together they would not sound right to the listener. To solve this problem, smooth processing of the splicing facility within the frequency domain is carried out, resulting in a smoother vocal.
--snip--
From this, I gather that the synthetic "voice" of the program is constructed by linking together samples of vowels etc provided by an actual singer?
What if we could harvest samples from a dead singer (vocal-only tracks from a studio master etc). Couldn't we then make a dead singer "sing" again? New songs? The Elvis comeback single of '04?
I downloaded the first "Leon" sample on Yamaha's site, and it sounded very convincing.
da5id
I don't know why people on this board are bagging WMA. To my ears it's superior to MP3 in the compression/quality stakes.
.WMA file encoded at 160 kbps sounds as good as an MP3 encoded at 192 kbps or above! You only have to try it on your computer.
.MPC by MusePack, though it's not supported by any hardware player.
I'm real fussy about how my music sounds, too
I did a test the other day encoding some music files to different formats and rates.
A
I think a lot of folks don't change the setting in Windows Media Player from the default 64 kbps encoding rate.
I have a Creative CD/MP3 player that plays both MP3's and WMA's. You get far more music files on a CD in WMA format with no (to my ears) loss of quailty.
eg, One More Robot by The Flaming Lips encoded with LAME at 192 kbps creates a file size of 7,021 KB. The same song encoded into WMA at 160 kbps creates a file size of 5,892 KB with better quality sound.
I read that the BEST lossy format is probably
da5id
I mainly used the real player to sample musical snippets from over at amazon.com.
.viv video files. I found out that Real had bought the format, and in order to install their .viv player, I had to wade through pages of porn. I eventually installed a program called VivTV instead, written by a guy called Allen Cheng which admirably did the job.
However now (at least when using Internet Explorer), Amazon has employed it's own Music Sampler which, for me, doesn't require rebuffering every couple of seconds like Reals used to do. (Yes, Amazon still has samples in Real and Windows Media format, but this new sampler is so much better). I don't think I'll be using Real much any more.
Also, I remember a while back I was trying to install a player which played the old
da5id