Customer Reviews

My Voice

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

The feature list sounds awesome, but there is a catch: the software often mistakes certain musical sounds for vocals, in some cases suppressing some of the most prized elements of the recording.

I tried out version 1.4.5 with a couple of audio CDs and several MP3s. The program's interface is very rich in controls, and it seems especially busy because there is a large information pane that changes as you mouse over different parts of the window. This is handy because you don't need to right-click or press F1 for help, but as you move the mouse around it can be quite distracting. (It would be nice if there were a short delay so that the info pane didn't update until you had hovered the mouse over a particular control for a few hundred milliseconds.) After inserting a CD, the program either will find the names of the tracks in its local database or can look them up on the web. The player controls are fairly straightforward and you can use the mouse-over help combined with experimentation to decide which "special effects" you like.

To suppress the vocals on the current track, click the "MyVoice" button (arm holding microphone). You're likely to hear the volume decrease a bit as similar frequencies also are suppressed. You also may hear a little echo or "ghost voice" in the background, probably added in the studio to enhance the richness of the singer's voice. To adjust the effect, you click the MyVoice button to pop up a small panel that lets you boost or reduce the bass portion of the track, and make other adjustments that partially compensate for change in the higher registers. This part of the program could be better documented, but from my experiments, while it can help to rebalance the musical portions of the recording, it can't restore lost instruments. The problem was especially acute on the Santana hit Smooth, where many of the distinctive guitar solos disappeared along with Rob Thomas' vocals. Even percussion sounds, which a human could distinguish from a voice, occasionally were suppressed and impossible to restore. Because performance varies, you really just have to try it and see whether the effect "works" for your favorite songs.

(The Ripper lets you apply these adjustments to the tracks on a CD, saving the "no voice" tracks for future play. I didn't test this.)

When you are ready to sing, you call up the Sequencer. This dialog/pane leads to the options to record your own vocals and then mix them with the original track. The settings you made for the musical track in the player will carry over to the Sequencer, and you can make further adjustments as you desire. When recording your voice, it is best to have the Music Effects controls visible because then the program gives you visual feedback on the volume of your microphone and stops recording when the song is finished (otherwise, you have to stop it manually). When you play back your recording, you may be distressed to find that it is out of sequence with the original track. There is no way to adjust that at this point, so you should try to focus on the relative volume of the two tracks and whether you want to add any reverb, echo or other effects to your voice. When you are ready to mix them together, you click "Creates the mix music+vocals." After the software imports the two tracks, you can "pre-listen" to the mix and adjust the synchronization. I found that the program had sync gaps of anywhere from 75 to 200 milliseconds for MP3s, but was perfect for audio CD tracks. If the relative volume needs further adjustment, you need to cancel out of this dialog and return to the sequencer (this is a little frustrating since it seems as though it should be such a simple adjustment). When your mix is perfect, you can save it as a WAV file and, optionally, burn it to audio CD.

All in all, it's a fun toy with a number of frustrations. Other developers could learn from the software's unique behavior when you click on a control that is not available because you have a dialog open: it move the pointer to the dialog's close button and highlights it so you know what you need to do to navigate to that control. On the other hand, this can happen when you click in the wrong part of a control that actually is currently available. (For example, when the Sequencer is open, you can drag the sliders on the Equalizer, but if you double-click a slider to enter a numeric value, the pointer moves to the Sequencer's Close button even though this is a perfectly appropriate function in that context.) Some quibbles arise from lack of compliance with Windows conventions. For example, the navigator to browse for MP3s has a tree view in the left pane, but cannot show subfolders in the right pane, just files. That should be easy to fix. However, the main problem is that the software simply falls short of the very ambitious project of removing just the vocals. In this, the developers may be ahead of the market (and available freeware), but they still have a lot of work to do.

I purchased My Voice software thinking, "They have finally made this technology available at an affordable price". Not so, there are two things you should know about about this product. One, it is very easy to use, you just click on the play button for a song and click on the voice extracter icon (the hand with the microphone). Two, when you click on the hand with the microphone, all you get is your song (voice and all) with the sound turned way down and slightly muffled. The bottom line is, this product does not work. I was extremly disappointed, however, since I did not pay that much for the item I was not livid! I gave it one star, instead of zero, because the product will play your CDs and it will find the names of the songs on your CDs.

This came with a microphone which fell apart in the box. Bad start. But I suppose you get what you pay for. The interface is clumsy and the sound quality was poor. It does have a couple of nice tools built in, like a tempo varying slider which is very handy and studio effects like echo and reverb. But you might be better off spending more money for a sound studio program.

I have read some alarming reviews of this software and felt compelled to at least add some balance. I have owned this for nearly two years, bought it at a bargain price at the now defunct CompUSA store. I was curious about these types of programs but they always seemed so expensive and besides, all I wanted to do was have a liitle fun and explore the possibilities.

The product does hang up once in a while and it certainly has it's limiitations. It will take out the voice track on some songs perfectly while on some others, it will only knock the voice track volume way down. It also takes a little "hands-on" experimenting since the instruction manual is not very helpful. Practice holding the microphone at differing distances and angles from your mouth, and adjust the volumes and tones from your PC, and you can get a workable sound.

In the end, I have successfully made a couple of hundred songs and mostly with quality far beyond the cheap price. I have more than gotten my money's worth. If you have always wondered about these programs and just want to try one for little monetary risk, pick one up. Be patient and "doodle" with all of the adjustments and you might just be surprised how good you can make yourself sound.

If you are curious and want to see how you would sound singing your favorite songs, pick this program up and see what you can do. On the other hand, if really you think you might be the next "American Idol" or something, go spend big money in a program that you think will do you the most good.

After opening the programs the words "insert CD" blink over and over. It was very difficult to navigate through the program. I couldn't figure out how to enter mp3s into the program.

After reading the confusing manual I tried to get my mp3 files in it, but it couldn't recognize almost all of them. The ones it did, wouldn't play, and it said

"error initializing microsoft directX
please re-install directX or contact the technical support"

so, from the CD, I tried to reinstall directX and got this message:

"Directx setup has determined the a newer version of DirectX is already installed. No installation was necessary"

leaving this program useless. No tech support. Don't buy this.

This product does not do what I purchased it for. It is completely useless to me now. It does not take the lyrics out of the songs as it advertises.

You're better off finding a box, filling it with rocks, then take the money out of your wallet that you would have paid for this and light it on fire. At least when the money is gone you'll have a handy box of rocks. This is a Rip Off. Greed has produced an illusion of a product. I don't normally fall for this kind of Snake Oil, but it was in a reputable store and I wanted what it said it would do, and became blind to the fact that the company didn't advertise a location, telephone number, website, on the package, blah, blah, blah. All the reviews about blinking messages, not being able to read music on your computor, etc, I experienced with my first hour of trying to figure out if this pathetic box of junk could produce anything worth while. It did not. I wish I had the box of rocks. Zero Stars.

MyVoice is pretty good at fading the voice part out on about half the songs I have tried - does particularly good with numbers like "Hero" by Enrique Iglesias and "Masterpiece" by Atlantic Starr. But i wasn't expecting it to work across the board. Users should note that some of the functions (such as playback of ripped tracks or MP3s) doesn't work under the newer version of Windows (not even talking about Windows 7), and appears to need a "DirectX upgrade", which still doesn't help. Anyhow, my older PCs can handle it, but the ripped versions of tracks with voice faded out are far worse than the real time output from a CD - perhaps I need to play with it some more. Overall, a fun complement to a full karaoke system - but still pretty much a toy and not a serious tool. Haven't tried the mixer part though.

My Voice
I have bought this product over two years. In general, the product idea is excellent, but the implementation restricts its usability.
How I use it? I basically enjoy singing with our friends. This product allows us to sing together in a karaoke like fashion. We pick the song we like and add lyrics to the songs, open my voice application, project the lyrics to a big screen and sing. So much fun.
On the plus side:
1. Allow you to create lyrics easily.
2. Sing songs with lyrics full screen in Karaoke style.
3. Sing with voice and no voice.

My friends are impressed in our gathering. However, on the "lack" side when we use the software:

1. No play list. Each person needs to have their own favorite play lists with customizable settings.
2. The singing list cannot be ordered manually. I have to rename the song title with '1', '2'.. to order it. So while singing, we don't have to search for the song.
3. When sing in full screen mode, could not repeat the same song or go back to last one without leaving the screen lyrics mode.
4. The lyrics are in program storage, make it very hard to back up the lyrics.
5. Need personally customizable backdrop for the same song. Like when A sing a song, it could select picture X, while B could select picture Y for the same song.
6. Need songs search capability. If we have over 100 songs, browsing to find a song is a big problem.

With the above improvement, I'll give this product a 5 stars. I am surprised that IPE is still updating the software (my original version is 1.52) but not any of those mentioned above. Because of this limitations, I am reluctant to recommend to our friends to use it. I hope that these easy implementation will be in the coming updates and I could give it a 5 stars.

I bought this for my niece and nephew and the microphone never worked. Save your money