How can the portamento for Cantai be turned off?
It’s horrible!
it can’t be turned off but anyway, you shouldn’t be seeing it in more than a handful of instances, usually with larger leaps and/or long sustained notes. I find it rarely to be an issue with the latest release. You could try shortening the offending notes in the key editor – that’s sometimes helped for me.
There really should be a control for portamento. To have to change the notes, whether duration or actual note is a sloppy work around.
For the particular piece I’m working on I opted to go back to the vocals I often use with EW Opus. Cantai is failing miserably with this particular score.
Cantai also does some bizarre things like the exported audio tracks are out of sync with the rest of the tracks. So much so there was nearly a 5 second delay at the end of the piece. I got fed up with it and went back to using east west. Hopefully this gets resolved soon because at first I was excited about it but now I’m having second thoughts.
I think to get the best results out of Cantai, the parts need to be a single voice – like for human singers.
Writing chords in the same voice can get undesired results, like parts getting out of sync. At least in my limited experience.
Obviously in real life, allowing homorhythmic voice parts to share a staff and stem is no problem for notation that will be presented to people, so it may be necessary to have a separate set of players for the purposes of getting good Cantai playback that you don’t then show in your full/vocal score.
I faced this situation with the prior version in some pieces, but the most recent release solved this where it occurred in my case.
I think we must remember that Cantai has not yet really developed into a useful professional tool that we might engage on a regular basis to demo our work. It’s just not there yet. Hopefully, after this Intel Mac beta and release, we will find attention focused, for once, entirely on the musicianship of the AI voices without adding new features that break something already working.
Despite the numerous improvements, we still have issues with degradation of singer quality the longer a file is open and the cache grows with each edit; inability to match Dorico’s entire dynamic range to the voices; consistency in dynamics and less of the louder for higher and softer for lower mentality (not a professional approach at all); missing initial consonant sounds, consonants at the end of a duration occurring too soon thus cutting the duration of the sung note; and, among other things, not following grammatical rules for definitives and adjectives.
Possibly going too far. As regards demoing work, almost all my vocal works (around 5 hrs of music) in languages supported by Cantai use it for the demos. I just put up with the irritations and frustrations --which seem to be different with each release – because the overall result is unmatched.