Cantai Reviews
Sibelius and Dorico have been in the 3.0 update since July 1st. Why are MuseScore Studio being treated like a second/third class program? I don't get it.
theres no bass, and the song im using it for has a bass solo and the low notes just sound really bad with the baritone voice, i would love this if you guys would add a bass voice!
1. it doesn’t work with wi-fi turned off, which to me means it doesn’t really work offline. 2. it is still on v2.0.1 (updated 2 months ago), despite dorico and sibelius having already received the 3.0 update (july 1rst). I see no point in using a plugin that isn’t updated regularly - especially when the current version has such huge issues with vibrato and no SATB choir. i will buy a cantai license at full price once those 2 issues have been fixed for Musescore.
I let this thing process 8 measures of music for 32 hours. One single line, 8 measures, 32 hours on highspeed fiberoptic internet that I'm hardwired Ethernetted into. It NEVER processed. I tried with multiple different pieces, multiple voices, I uninstalled and reinstalled. Nothing. Don't waste your time.
Partner Response: Hi there, we’re sorry to hear you’re experiencing an issue. Could you please share more details by submitting a support ticket here? Our team will be happy to help: https://support.musehub.com/hc/en-gb/requests/new
Great work. Sometimes it shows that it's work in progress, but nevertheless it will prove useful.
I bought this plug-in becuase in Dorico and sibelius versions Spanish is already supported and I thought that the MuseSounds version will also be updated in order to support Spanish. Also I need to customize jow many voices I want my choir to be made of and not getting a number of voices determined randomly by the plug-in. Is this going to be possible sometime in the future?
Partner Response: Thanks for your feedback! We’re actively working on improvements, and you can expect updates soon.
Can't even place syllables in the correct places, enunciations of constanants come so late that it feels like its on a different beat. Insists on this weird out of tune vibrato with no way to set parameters of any kind
It's a good Idea, but, we should be able to set parameters like sound attack, vibrato, glissando...
Whenever I select one of the voices, the message ‘Processing…’ appears indefinitely. In a 4 voices piece, I can hear the soprano only and the rest is piano sound. It clearly can't sing a latin text.
If you think about using this for anything other than contemporary and modern choir arrangements, don't buy it. It doesn't sync with other instruments very well. It works for my purpose (contemporary a cappella) but can sound kind of weird, especially with higher and lower notes for each vocal type. It's certainly a cool concept that has a lot of potential. It will be much, much better in a few years or so I imagine, but this version is still cool to mess around with and somewhat useful.
I am mainly an orchestral composer, but I have written a lot of choral work as well. This fits a much more contemporary style need. This works in pop, jazz, modern-style application. It does not work so much as a traditional large choral CHOIR library. The diction is modern, microphone right at the voice, lots of “scooping” up to initial pitches. That all being said, the fact that it reads normally written lyrics and gets the pronunciation correct is amazing. The voices blend well. I use this currently to layer in the mix on top of using EastWest’s Hollywood Choirs, so the diction is better.. I am fluent in Votox, but it’s not perfect. This smoothes out the roughness. But it has to be deep in the mix otherwise it stands out. Looking forward to a proper larger choir version of this….
Ok so, this will be a bit long. So, i'm a composer. I write mainly orchestral music, and liturgical Catholic music, mostly in latin and spanish. (I live in México tho.) I have acces to Cantai because i'm paying the Muse Sounds Pro subscription. This context is pretty much important because, as a professional musician this product is COMPLETELY UNUSABLE. If you're not a prof, you can end here: Try it. It sounds decent, it Works mostly well in english, the voices are ok. It might help your choir to know what to sing. But if you're a professional, keep reading. 1. The "voices" are MEEH. Like, meh. There is one soprano that it's barely usable, but it tends to sing like "pop". This definetly does not work if you're doing classical, but for "pop-ish" sounds, it might work. The devs should put a lot more attention into how the sound actually is, as "singing - playing styles" it's one of the most important things we as composers have in account. Specially, because more than one "voice" adds grace notes that are not written anywhere in the score. Specially the men, when going from one note to another. The "baritones" are completely unusable, don't even try. The tenors, there is one that Works well as pop music, but all the other ones just don't work for classical. One even sounds like a woman voice tuned down. 2. In musescore, the processing SUCKS. That's the only way i can describe it. And it's not my computer, i have a pretty beast of a machine as desktop (i7, 32gb ram, 12 gb video dedicated, 2tb ssd etc.), and a MacBook Pro m3 24gb ram, and a pretty much stable 500mbps symmetrical internet connection and IT TAKES FOREVER TO PROCESS, and suddenly it stops and it says "Online sounds are not ready", and you can't do anything with it. Like, anything. Just totally unusable. And real deal here it's that IT WON'T TELL YOU WHY. It just stops, and Good luck finding why it won't process. There is not an error log, or "click here to retry", or "you should change this syllabe, or anything. NOTHING. And there's no offline processing, so either you open the file again or try to move something in the text, but you won't ever know why it won't render. This should be easy to fix: a freaking toggle that lets you "Process offline" or "Process online", because i understand that this processing takes quite a lot of resources, but my brother, i have them, let me use it. 3. The "Choir" mode it's actually 3 or 4 voices of the same "soprano, alto, tenor or baritone" (there is no actual bass.), and it sucks. It sounds pretty awful. 4. The dynamics are PAINFUL. They don't even try. That's the only thing i have to say. 5. About the languages, well, it says clearly that they only support english. It DOES NOT SUPPORT LATIN. Latin does not work as expected. You should have a language option, that you select when selecting the voice in the mixer. So, conclussion: If you're not a PRO, you should try this. Pretty nice tech, it "Works" within musescore. If you're a pro, i STRONGLY SUGGEST DO NOT PAY FOR THIS STANDALONE. It's not even close to be worth it the full price. It might be in the future, but not now. Suggestion to the devs: Check out "cantamus.app". They've been making this kind of synthesis since 2022, and it's pretty stable and predictable. Thank you, and good luck.
Partner Response: Hi there, thanks for getting in touch with us. Could you please share more details by submitting a support ticket here? Our team will be happy to help: https://support.musehub.com/hc/en-gb/requests/new
For choir members it’s a VERY useful tool, especially for people who don’t read music or have little time to practice, they can even practice in the car. I export the mp3 for each part and for the whole choir together and distribute them to the members. Really happy with this tool.
I don't get it. What do most of the voices sound like very sickly little children?? There's only 1 useful baritone, and none of the tenors voices are useable. The so-called "opera" voices sound as if they're singing while on life-support. The mezzo choice are reasonable, and the "Rigoletto" baritone are useful. But beyond that...WOW. Where is the real Cantai quality choices?!?! Please FIX THIS! we're paying for this product which is still struggling.
Is it perfect? Does it save real singers? No, absolutely not. Is it soooooo much better for writing and arranging songs for voices and choirs than anything available so far? Oh yes!!!!! As someone who focuses on vocal arrangements, this is already a gamechanger!
It's ok for the moment but that is the problem 'for the moment'. I cannot bet for the uncertainty. I'm sticking with Synthesizer V. I'll keep it as positive cause this project has a great potencial I just need reliability. Keep it up though.
Its a cool idea and it definitely has potential, but right nowit needs a lot of work. A lot of the voice tones need work,most of them sound kind of choppy instead of smooth and natural like a real voice. The only one that sounded close to natural is Aurelia. The biggest issue I ran into is timing. When you use the AI synth, the vocals end up delayed, so they don’t line up properly with the instrumental parts. I did find a workaround though: I exported the vocal line without Cantai, then exported another version with Cantai, and lined them up in a DAW. That works, but it really feels like something that should be fixable inside MuseScore itself. It would help a lot if there was just a simple track delay setting so everything could be aligned properly. It would also be nice if you could some how control what notes you want vibrato on. also noticed some dynamic issues, but those are easy enough to fix once you move things into a DAW. Overall, it’s not quite there yet, but it shows promise if the timing and vocal smoothness get improved.
It's kind of nice to be able to listen to a score with the lyrics actually sung, but that's about as far as I can praise this. The voices sound warbly and poorly-tuned, especially using the choir (male) and choir (female) options but I'm also having the issue with solo voices too. I also find it hard to get the voices to actually sing the word sounds that I want them to - making it sing "live" with a short i sound proves difficult, and for some reason it just forgets to sing some short words like "I"'s between other words. The lack of information about what the voices will actually sound like isn't ideal either - "Marco" and "Carmen" mean nothing to me. The official Cantai website only has information about a couple of these voices, with some on MuseScore not even being mentioned there. I'd much rather just have them named "bold soprano" or "soft bass", rather than these meaningless people-names that just seem to be there to try to make you forget this is an AI voice. The website claims that they're using ethical AI and that the singers whose voices are being used are getting a cut, but the fact that several of the voices don't have credited singers, and many are missing entirely, makes me unsure on that front. All in all, I'm glad I only got a 1 month subscription. It's far from good and I'd honestly rather just listen to my scores with the basic MuseScore sound pack, and sing it myself.
The only thing decent about it is indeed the text pronunciation, the vocal samples sound very bad, the terrible vibrato in the make and female choir is very off putting, so you are left with the solo voices that sound like the only repertoire they are used to is Amercan Christmas carols and even the intonation is off, the dynamics are off. I'm glad I only bought a month subsrciption. Worst thing is, the syncing with online voices gets stuck most of the time during processing and it's not my glassfibre internet connection causing it. So no, not better than nothing, The cinesamples library has way superior samples but unfortunately no lyrics pronounciation.
Are there plans in the near future to add voices more suitable for country and southern gospel genres? The existing voices are a bit too classical/operatic for that.
Voice tones sound very bad, the intonation is not accurate at all.
This is certainty better than nothing but there's not enough here just yet. You can't change the ensemble size and this sounds like a vocaloid. That being said, it's early tech and is impressive to get on musescore of all things.
it works reasoanbly well, but it is missing more normal tenor and bass voices. A big issue is that every time even a small part is changed, the voice on the whole score is updated, and this is slow and only online. This makes it hard to use with bad internet.