[B-Muzik]

Originally Posted by macleodgrant

i said i would do a shootout and did one but my experiences were of frustration.

waves tune is not a user friendly plugin like melodyne.
horizontal scrolling with mouse wheel doesn't work
navigation in general just feels miles away from melodyne! if you could resize the interface it would help a lot but the interface is just too small. the detection can be a bit of a nightmare. if you detect an entire piece and it detects only a few notes incorrectly (which it did) then you have to remove those parts and then change the RANGE and rescan that part of the audio! this is very counterintuitive as i had to do a couple of passes to get it right!

i tried to capture a bass track for tuning but for some reason tune didn't appear to record most of the notes as if it were out of range. i gave up on this!

the tools are also unintuitive and you should read the manual to understand the tools to use them properly. the most frustrating part is that you can't seem to control the tuning with a tool but rather have to first select the note, then turn 3 knobs (note transition, speed & ratio) to get the effect that you're looking for. it's a little less fussy than melodyne with regards to the relation between the appearance of the tuning curve and what you hear. if you draw in a curve yourself and there's a glitch in your drawing then it doesn't seem to sound whereas in melodyne if there's a glitch then you hear it (it seems to have a tolerance). i also found i couldn't get the effect i wanted at the note transition and it was necessary to draw in the tuning line but my drawing aint so good and there doesn't appear to be a way to smooth out your drawing afterwards! i just got too frustrated and spent way too much time trying to get it right. splines would be great here!

waves tune, once it captures the vocal and if detection is correct, before any changes are made, it does sound more natural than melodyne. tuning capabilities i found could be similar and you can push tune a little further than melodyne but IMO it's just a lot harder than i feel it needs to be. it took ages to get anywhere with it that i just gave up and went to melodyne! i think i'll wait for Tune V2 if it ever happens though for a quick edit to a word or phrase i think it could be quick! i prefer melodyne's approach in that where you remove the audio from melodyne, it reverts to the original audio on the track (unaffected) whereas with tune you don't have the option so you would have to put it on a new track!

melodyne for navigation and how intuitive it is to use is just amazing and DAW designers should take some tips from these guys!
zooming, mouse wheel and panning are a dream. you can correct the detection too which save a bit of time.

melodyne captured the bass track that waves tune wouldn't but it affected the sound way too much. the bass was nice and full and after just being recorded into melodyne the quality was affected in a big way. i then decided to edit the bass manually and ignore the tuning issues which weren't too bad anyways.

for vocals, melodyne is a real lifesaver. for instance, if you are trying to make harmonies sit in time with the main vocal for better intelligibility then it's all possible here and the tools to do it are so intuitive. you don't even need to read the manual to use this plugin, seriously! the interface can be made larger so it's much easier to navigate. unlike tune, it doesn't have rewire capabilities so you can't navigate your session within the plugin alone. i didn't find this to be a huge limitation as i used logics 'play from left window edge' key command and just scrolled over the session keeping the part i'm working on at the left of the arrange. i always had to click to activate the arrange before i could scroll (using mouse wheel) though in leopard this should no longer be an issue!

navigation from within plugins should get a lot easier as the new audio unit implementation (i think new in leopard) allows plugins to now send midi information to the DAW which is very interesting and would mean waves tune wouldn't need to use rewire to set locate points, etc and also means it shouldn't be too long before melodyne has similar functionality!

conclusion
waves tune
waves need to rethink the tools a little bit more and add a tool that allows you to graphically tune and adjust note transition rather than using the knobs.
detection should be easier to adjust after being captured
should be able to resize the interface
should be able to smooth the tuning line after you've drawn in your own or they should implement splines as a drawing option

waves tune has a lot of power but its made difficult to use by the lack of navigation options. the quality is good and in caes better than melodyne but i feel they need to implement the note transition and speed into tools...much like the 'demodulation' in melodyne. i need to try tuning a different bass track but i don't see why i shouldn't be able to do this in tune...i will keep you updated!

melodyne
great interface, great tools and easy to access. the fact you can edit timings can be a real lifesaver. sometimes (dependent on mic and preamp used) i've noticed the vocal loses a bit of highs (air) and is slightly darkened - this isn't always the case. the fact you can edit the detection is great. the fact the bass track changed so much just lets us know that we should be relying on these kinds of tools to 'fix in the mix' and that we should always try and get the best at source.
for the most part the artefacts are minimal in vocal tuning

one more thing, i found waves tune great for helping to come up with harmony ideas and for that tune sounds more natural to me! it captures quick and you can just push notes to wherever you want and it helped me to show the vocalist what i was looking for

Yeah melodyne is really user friendly...thats crazy! And its sick!