I know Cantai, in its current form, is not for everyone. Clearly it is the beginning of something, not a fully polished product. But I think we should take a moment to recognize and thank Steinberg for being willing to to invest significant development resources in something that may not have a direct pay-back to Steinberg but is clearly an important step in the industry.
These are not easy times for makers of music products, particularly on the software or creative side. I think it is noteworthy that Steinberg is willing to embrace AI-related things rather than to try to become insular.
Open systems are scary. Many companies naturally gravitate toward proprietary things. But it is clear to me that the real power of technology in the music field comes from openness and the ability for products to work together. I bet there is a lot of soul searching within Steinberg and its peer companies on this issue. I, for one, appreciate their choice to come down on the side of embracing connectivity.
I know a lot of people are poo-pooing cantai in its current incarnation, but the fact that any automatic singing is happening at all is really quite something. More progress has been made by cantai in a short while than by other VST companies that have attempted to do something similar (albeit less automatic) for years. It certainly feels like we are at the bottom of the hill looking up, not the other way around, and I find that exciting.
By consequence, I’m grateful to the developers of Cantai, as well as the Dorico dev team for making sure that they can play nicely together. Things will only improve from here.
Little aside
As an aside, and not meaning to derail the thread, I also think the alarmism seen in a few places on other social media platforms about “AI TAKING JOBS AND OUTSOURCING ART!!!” are totally missing the mark. This is a compositional tool, not a replacement for real people. (To wit: products which aim to be replacements for real people DO already exist!) But to have a new tool to help composers audiate and iterate their compositions is a good thing. Noteperformer, lovely though it is, will never replace real string players making real recordings. Cantai will never replace real singers giving real performances of real works. But it sure is nice to have something to show for it in-between such real performances.
Not at all. I think it is all related. As an aside of mine, last night I had a rehearsal with a jazz big band. For our next show, I have been thinking about doing a piece that I “created” on Suno. It is not a great creative masterpiece, but it is a fun little thing.
As this show will be in the largest jazz club in our region, I know there will be some in the audience highly hostile to AI. I might get boo’ed off the stage, but what I am attempting to show is that AI can be a useful tool. The tune is catchy with some goofy lyrics, but that’s what I expected when I asked for a song about “unsuccessful fishing in the Caribbean islands.”
And the point I will try to make is that a live band “owning” this song is way beyond anything we will ever see from a computer program. I did a sketch arrangement for the rehearsal, and the band loved the tune. It is sort of a “Tower of Power goes to New Orleans and hooks up with a Jamaican ska singer high as a kite” vibe.
And I did use Cantai as I was doing this sketch. It was nothing like a real singer, but still pretty amazing. I will experiment with some backup vocals using Cantai. Too bad they can’t do polyphony yet.
I wish Cantai well. Unfortunately, I was about to purchase it at the pre-order price but missed it by literally one day. If it ever goes on sale, I will reconsider. I was hesitant until I saw the Steinberg video.
If I understand it correctly, from their FAQ page:
it says this:
Does one license cover all integrations? Yes. A single lifetime license covers Dorico, Sibelius, and MuseScore Studio.
I wonder if you purchased the Sibelius version, the license key would work for Dorico anyway.
You could ask Cantai, unless someone replies here it does not.
I was wondering about this as well tbh. I feel Cantai is too crude at the moment to be of any use but it’s not completely inconceivable that it might have made sufficient strides by the time of the release of the Sibelius version to invest in that license. After all, in theory a license is for all platforms.
On @cparmerlee’s initial point, I’m not sure how significant Cantai is in itself. it’s actually relatively late to the table in vocal synthesis which would explain why it’s so far behind the likes of SynthesizerV in terms of expressiveness and sophistication. After all, Dreamtonics were working for 4 years on their set of choirs which is the current benchmark. It’s hard for me to even consider Cantai at present when I know what’s actually possible. Having said that, the idea of integrating directly into notation software, rather than through an external interface is new and potentially a big time saver when it starts to work properly and considerably faster. And naturally if the vocal models improve and have their own clear personality (there are some signs of that already), then I’d be only to happy to invest in what is still a market with relatively few competitors. However, if the ambition for Cantai is to go no further than a basic, NotePerfomer style proofing tool, then you can count me out. I’d like to think they want to achieve more, though.
I don’t know how sophisticated his licensing scheme is but it might be that the pre-order version for Sibelius will not activate until the Sibelius release date.