Cantai Poll on Notation Software used by choral composers

The developers of the forthcoming API/plugin Cantai, which claims it will give a Noteperformer-like experience (complete with sung lyrics) for composers of choral music, vocal art songs, and operas, recently conducted a poll on their Discord of users. Since Dorico was the most commonly-used notation software, the devs gave me permission to share here:

Obviously it’s not a scientific poll, the dataset size is small, and there’s almost certainly some selection bias in the Discord. Still, I thought it was cool that Dorico seems to be the most popular notation software for choral composers (this is definitely true within my circle of colleagues since Finale support was dropped by MakeMusic). Given Dorico’s popularity, I’m hoping future versions of Dorico will contain some quality of life improvements for choral music (suppression of player labels when condensing with divisi, automatic addition/deletion of word extenders when changing length of notes, proper handling of automatic divisi arrows in all cases, inclusion of lyrics within exported MIDI files).

And I’m hoping that Dorico will one day soon support automatic playback of lyrics (internally and via third-party plugins).

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Thank you so much for this post, Eric. :slightly_smiling_face:

Cantai is here. Looks and sounds extremely interesting and promising.

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I pre-ordered, at half price, the perpetual license. Very excited at the prospect of using Cantai for my sung voice projects. Richard deCosta doesn’t believe in the subscription model for the regular user version of Cantai. He said he’ll charge a subscription for the developer API.

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Revolutionary, I think. Unlike Synthesiser V, Cantai works directly “inside” Dorico like NotePerformer! :slightly_smiling_face: Reading and interpreting the score and its lyrics in several languages.

Thanks for posting.

It looks very promising - all the more so as they’re not just setting themselves up for Classical vocal but also for jazz vocal ensembles. They appear to be focused on Sibelius initially, moving on to Dorico by April this year.

If it is as good as they’re claiming and, like Note Performer, it works right out of the box, it’ll be a no-brainer for me.

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I’m looking forward to April when the Dorico version is planned. I’m hoping that by then we will have a choir which is really useable as however good the technology is, it’s of little use if the choir doesn’t sound musical. But of course another thing which will set this apart is the range of singers and some of the soloists sound to me more promising than what I’ve heard of the choirs to date. Still, it’s early days and this is potentially really interesting software. I’m sure a few of us wouldn’t mind saying goodbye to an exclusive reliance on Wordbuilder if Cantai really delivers the goods.

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Are you familiar with Cantamus? That one produces straight-tone SATB singers in English and Spanish (maybe others) that follow dynamics. You upload music xml and then get back multitrack mp3 files, which you can then load into a DAW. Sounds a little better than Cantai for straight-tone choral singing. It’s what I’ve been using for about a year, but no new features in that time and their dev team doesn’t really interact with end users on the discord.

Cantai, on the otherhand, has a very dynamic discord, with Richard posting multiple times a day and interacting with end users. It reminds me a lot of the Dorico product team, in that regard.

To be honest, the only reason I haven’t purchased the pre-order yet, is that, based on my (albeit limited) knowledge of VST3/AU, what they are trying to do (getting lyrics in realtime) seems impossible, without Dorico exposing other API’s to the plugin.

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if you’re asking me, I’ve posted several times on Cantamus and, if I remember correctly, actually posted a mock-up I’d made using them a while back in their beautiful Latin (the Lux Aeterna from my Mass). For sacred music they’re far better than Cantai as things stand – unfortunately, as you say, it doesn’t look as if they’re developing very actively and I really need proper control of the end product through a VST. They only have one choral sound which is particularly good for earlier music but won’t work for everything – indeed that’s not really their aim as they’ve primarily developed this as a rehearsal aid, rather than for the mock-ups I’m looking for.

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As an experienced choral singer, I’m experimenting with singing my parts by hand, often doing multiple layers and using Dreamtonic’s Vocoflex to make my voice sound like other singers, and then using Audio Modelling’s Ambiente (room simulator) to place all the layers at different locations in a room. It makes for a convincing choral sound, and I get exactly what I want. Transposing up an octave for SA parts can get a little dicey—will likely have to hire a mezzo to cover the female layers. But, that method is very time-consuming and potentially expensive. Will potentially post the results here in a few weeks, depending on what the forum’s policy is on posting your own works.

well there’s a “made-with-dorico” tag for posting your own compositions which a number of people, myself included, have made use of. I, for one, would be interested in what you come up with.