Best Voice Design Software ?

[eightyeightkeys]

I use to have a plug-in called Voice Designer from Spectral Design that was very good at pitch shifting voices/voice overs without too many artifacts. None of my ol' install CD's work on XP. Too bad. I really liked that software.

I'm doing a bunch of voice over work for kids cartoons and I need voice manipulation software that is outstanding. Very little to no artifacts. Any ideas ?

[manning1]

dmusic....
i dont know how near perfection this will get you....but one feature of
powertracks that i use (of many) is pitch shifting. down to the cents level.
you can pitch shift up or down.
there is also a built in rta (usefull in eq'ing) and many other audio editing features.
including graphic and para eq and compressors and effects like echo/reverb etc.
many folks have commented that the pitch shifting is pretty good. but i would try the demo and see if it gives you the results you want.
you can get the demo at pgmusic.com.
you might also check out the built in tc helicon feature which will do some interesting things as well...and has now built in "voice styles" which i've been looking at.

on a side note i'm a computer engineer and use pitch shift dsp algorithms to test out how well a particular pc system performs. its actually one of the best tests ive come across....to test a pc...because of the interplay tween disc drives and processor in this dsp test.. i mention this in case your ever looking at a new pc system.
for example do this test sometime.
record a 3 minute vocal and hi lite it, then time how long different amd and intel systems take to pitch shift the track useing the same pitch shift setting.
youll find some very interesting results if you time with a stopwatch.
this is the method i used that led me to conclude the very inexpensive amd sempron 3100 processor paired with fast memory and hard drives was an excellent low cost daw/recording solution.
all the best.

[eightyeightkeys]

Thanks Manning.

One of the best features of UltraVoice or VoiceDesigner (why did they change the name ?....I think they changed it a third time btw...) is that you monitored the change in real time. You could tweak it to perfection as you went.

dog gone it.

P.S. Interesting about the PC test.

[manning1]

dmusic....
thanks....yes..the pitch shift dsp test really cuts through the BS re....
which is the most powerfull system. basically it cuts through marketing hype.
in a past life i had to buy computers both large and small for large orgs with big computer budgets...so we were always designing stress tests...ie ..real life stress tests...like this.
as to your needs i'm sorry i cant paste the whole powertracks pitch shifting part of the manual here...just dont have space.....and i dont want to annoy the mods.
you can also time stretch/reduce...and as there are 100 cents in each octave...
you can get pretty precise....and theres a bunch of other things like creating special fx.
for example i just did a song demo about dragons where i created some special effects......to create the sound of a dragon flying ....i recorded myself rattling some dog cookies around a rubbermaid box my wife had.....then morphed the recording useing some powertracks fx to create the illusion of dragons flying.
if you go to www.motagator.com/bmanning and play the dragons in the sky demo youll hear the fun i had with my morphing experiments....including little baby dragon chirps at the end...which i morphed from recording my cat...and useing pitch shift and other effects. i dont know how successfull i was....but it was tons of fun....and for me..thats what recordings all about !!
so i would suggest you try the demo and see how closely it meets your needs.
the built in tc helicon features might be of interest....for example morphing a male voice into a female voice as an example...there are loads of settings.