Omnivocal experiences so far

Cubase
1

only discovered voice synthesis options first time when i upgraded to cubase 15 and found it while searching for some new synth vst, hadnt read anything prior and was a great fun surprize, it got me extremely enthused and inspired!

thx for that steinberg/yamaha!

did start and finish 2 simple projects with omnivocal immediately and was a happy camper! then started a 3rd, more ambitious project and started observing a few phenomena that do justify the beta status:

  1. total resource hog! just saving the project (about 5 min long and maybe a dozen vst tracks including drums) takes suddenly over 10 seconds!, removing the 2 omnivore tracks (maybe 12 bars long) reduced the save and load times to mere 2 seconds again!

  2. when soloing a midi track in the piano roll, the omnivore channels dont mute out, they keep singing over the soloed midi track

  3. when 2 omnitrack channels are on, my drummer (ezdrums3) starts to get out of grooveā€¦ very weird, never observed that beforeā€¦

  4. when any of the runtime issues occur, the resource manager is not showing any system stress whatsoeverā€¦

all in all: a fun beta, but really not quite there yet, and i didnt even mention any of the feature challenges, language limits (tried to make it say gelato :wink: ) and any syllable to note mapping efforts are quite limitedā€¦

but also, it seems to be built into the cubase underbelly in quite a funky fashion with all the weird observations above, curious where its going to go. but also:

please let me know if i am missing any options to remedy my observed issuesā€¦

else, keep rockin!

-k

1 Like
Huge CPR file sizes due to OmniVocal MIDI parts
2

I find Omnivocal very effective, however I wonder when the Italian language will be implemented

3

I think it probably depends on what accent you are using to pronounce the word. Have you tried the phonetics etc. in section 5 of the manual? Iā€™ve found that with some trial and error, I can make all the words Iā€™ve needed so far. Sometimes I have had to split the word into separate syllables.

Youā€™ve made some interesting points. I havent had resource problems (96GB memory), but Iā€™ll be careful about my rhythms using Toontrack now :).

4

i got a 1y old i9-14900K with 192 GB ddr5, usually a quite snappy box, but omnivocal didnt like it :wink:

thx for pointing me to the docu! i should read more :blush:

5

How big is the CPR file? In my current project, I have 4 instances of Omnivocal, and they added approximately 5 MB to the project side (from roughly 36 MB to 41 MB). I donā€™t really pay attention to time to save a project in terms of number of seconds, but I didnā€™t notice any long delays, such as with autosaves (which is the one area where Iā€™ve sometimes noticed interruptions when something is making a project really big, such as if an ARA extension adds a bunch of audio data in the CPR file).

I have seen something along these lines, specifically when using the solo feature in the Key Editor, where, at last sometimes, tracks that arenā€™t being edited there are heard when using the solo feature intended to hear just the track Iā€™m currently working on. It may be the I have some misunderstanding relating to multiple tracks being selected to be in the key editor versus just the one that is active for editing. But there are two specific things Iā€™ve seen. One is where Iā€™m hearing all the Omnivocal tracks, not just the one Iā€™m working on at the time, and the other is sometimes hearing the drum track (not in the key editor at all) playing when working on Omnivocal tracks (and sometimes other tracks, too, I think). When I just wanted to hear one Omnivocal track, I ended up soloing that one in the MixConsole to work around hearing more Omnivocal tracks than I wanted to hear.

I havenā€™t seen this, but I tend to freeze, or render to audio, most instrument tracks by the time Iā€™m working intensively with vocals. I did have Omnivocal live earlier, just doing a placeholder lead vocal, while the drums would still have been live running out of SD3, but I didnā€™t notice anything.

I havenā€™t had any performance, or other significant issues, with Omnivocal thus far. FWIW, my system is Win11 i9 285k with 64 GB RAM. My project drive is an M.2 NVME drive (as is my system drive).

As someone else already mentioned, the beta user manual can be helpful on the note to syllable mapping aspects and pronunciations. There are still limitations (e.g. it doesnā€™t do ā€œRā€ sounds very well), but knowing how to enter sounds phonetically helps a good deal, as does understanding hyphen use to deal with melismas (i.e. spreading one syllable across multiple notes).

1 Like
6

thx rickpaul, great insights! one fun finding thx to your suggestion: (never paid attention to cpr file sizes before)

the cpr file with the 2 omniv channels is 1.2GB, wow

dir *.cpr output:
ā€¦
01/05/2026 12:35 PM 11,119,124 createdichselbstduarsch no voices.cpr
12/29/2025 09:16 PM 342,868,643 createdichselbstduarsch-01.cpr
12/30/2025 12:50 PM 533,345,790 createdichselbstduarsch-02.cpr
01/05/2026 12:22 PM 1,229,154,020 createdichselbstduarsch.cpr

looks like omniv is a cpr hog? and something in my workflow is a massive cpr feeder? been a cubaser since forever, and so much to learn stillā€¦ :wink:

7

I cannot confirm this. I never get even close to such file sizes when using Omnivocal. More in the 10-20 Mbyte range.
It is not a general issue,

8

agreed, not a general issue, was able to narrow it down to individual parts!

deleting the track helps, but when i try to preserve the part, it still remains ginormous

copying the part to different tracks doesnt, help, the info is preserved.

i believe something went haywire in the text entryā€¦

8 bar part, single track cpr is still 500MB

nothing in the midi eventsā€¦ still playing around with it

9

This, however, is the general behaviour of Omnivocal in Cubase. Omnivocal is not just another VST plugin but has a special extended integration with Cubase. This leads to some undesireable behaviour though.

10

ok, here my current summary:

something must have gone haywire in the instrument part for omnivocal, and an 8 bar piece with about 15 notes/syllables grew to over 500MB

and i had doubled that track/part, so over 1.2 GB parts were clogging the system and causing all kinds of funky behaviours, eg. the mouse roll over velocity number in the key editor were almost 0 responsive and other vst were not able to keep track with the timing, load times where unbelievable, like loading the cpr to extract tracks from taking up to 5 minutes!

i still have no clue what was wrong with the omnivocal part, but i saved a cpr with one track and the part, it is about 500MB big, would be curious to find out what was bad in there

anyways, i was not able to ā€˜clean upā€™ the part in question, i was able to export it as midi or copy it over in cubase 14 to some other track to make it usable again, i believeā€¦ but it wasnt easyā€¦ and of course i had to re-type in the text after the safe

one thing that confused me a lot here was that the performance meter didnt show anything! 0 stress pointers! so, which ever cubase resources were being stressed, it was not visible to the performance dude, but the system overall was not doing well, including many crashesā€¦

all is good again,
still curious how the part got corrupted in the first placeā€¦
and why the resource meter was completely blind to thisā€¦

11

Itā€™s a general issue here.

Iā€™ve had cpr file sizes grow to over 500MB using Omivocal. I tracked it down to the MIDI notes.

12

Iā€™ve had cpr file sizes grow to over 500MB using Omivocal. I tracked it down to the MIDI notes. delete the MIDI notes and the cpr file size goes down to normal