Cantai, verse 2 of “Abide with me”

Dorico
1

Hello,
today I took some time to try the cantai plugin with a setting of „Abide with me“.
I used the Otetto voices:

a) They seem to sing in pure intervals, which sounds really good for a chorus.
b) The lyrics of verse 2 are not picked up, instead the choir does a “eeeh, eeh eeh eeh”.
c) In verse 5 I changed lyric line 5 to lyric line 1 - here cantai picks them up and does a nice rendering job.

I guess the lyric line is a known limitation at the moment.

2

The release and transition to the next note is very clipped and too short. There’s no sense of phrase across notes. That is what makes it sound artificial (and something that NP is really good at, which makes it sound ‘real’, even if the sample quality isn’t.)

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3

What version of Cantai are you using? (Earlier versions had trouble with verses.) Could you attach a file?

It almost sounds like the “ee” sound from v.1 “abide with me” continues through the second verse.

4

Disappointed that you can’t set different languages for different Cantai VSTs.

I had to export the tracks separately, after setting each language.

5

With all due respect, I think Richard deCosta had in mind what he wanted and needed from Cantai and it has followed that path. Applications of the technology to what would seem logical to many of us simply wasn’t part of the development plan. Clear, correct pitches and rhythms took several iterations to even approximate the desired end result and still remains somewhat of an issue. The first Dorico release had singers that slid into most every pitch that was a greater interval from the previous pitch than a major second.

Rhythms are not always correct which fascinates me because, for example, an SATB homophonic setting with the same rhythms will be correct in three but not all four voices and the offending voice is not always the same across different works. I believe that many of us want a professional tool called Cantai that would be useful for others to use to preview our work. It is nowhere close to that yet. It, unfortunately, remains not much more than a toy.

I will give kudos to the initial quick response to issues, initially. Unfortunately, that has slowed to a snail’s pace. I will also give kudos for offering a Beta version to test GPU use. This particular beta release uses the GPU very nicely for rendering by significantly reducing rendering time by as much as 300% in my tests on an M2Max Mac Studio. And, if you leave the cache alone between uses, it opens files ready to “sing” within seconds.