Mu Technologies recently released the Windows and Mac OS X Universal Binary VST versions of Mu Voice, a plug-in that allows you to tune your vocal recordings, apply special effects and add natural sounding harmonies when mixing your track. Mu Technologies has developed proprietary spectral analysis and synthesis techniques for vocal processing providing a unique tool for your recording studio.

Mu Voice is currently available for the introductory price of $199 ($259 MSRP); demo versions are available. AU, RTAS and stand-alone versions are planned.

Key features:

• Harmonizing: An “intelligent” harmonizer takes into account the musical context of a piece like chord and scale information. You can configure each track by selecting the voicing (1st, 2nd, 3rd or 4th voice) and octave.
• Scale/Chord Selection: The chord panel offers a straight-forward interface to select chords and scales. When a scale is selected, the diatonic series of chords is given.
• Chord Scheme Editor: Chords and scales can be added to a chord scheme. After you have created your scheme you can use it to follow chord progressions.
• Mixer: The mixer allows you to mute and bypass some of the channels, to control the gain and apply an additional pitch shift.
• Tuner: Mu Voice comes with a built-in tuner that has a parametric impact. It can operate in “chromatic” or “scale” mode.
• Channel FX: For each track there is an additional set of FX.
• Pan: The panner allows you to spatialize your harmonies and uses interaural gains and delays based on psychoacoustic measurements.
• Humanizing: When the pitches of the harmonies are coupled too tight, they might interfere and be perceived as a single distorted voice. The “humanization” parameter solves this problem by adding very slight random pitch variations and an additional delay.
• Formants: The formants determine the “timbre” or “color” of the voice. When Mu Voice changes the pitch of the voice it maintains the formants.
• Filters: Mu Voice offers a number of filter presets; high-pass, band-pass, comb-filters, notch filters, etc.
• Harmonic EQ-ing: The proprietary spectral analysis techniques on which Mu Voice is based, allow to control the amplitude of each individual harmonic in the sound. This effect was named harmonic EQ-ing. A number of presets are provided that illustrate this unique feature.
• Preset Management: To keep the large number of control parameters manageable, all parameters that are not related to the chord scheme can be saved in presets. You can add these presets to the chord scheme.
  • Full Automation: The progression of chords and presets can be fully automated in two steps:
  • Write Mode: When the plug-in is put in write-mode it records the time instants of your chord progression.
    o Read Mode: In read-mode the plug-in will synchronize itself to the host time so that it becomes fully automated.
• XML based file exchange: The plug-in state, chord scheme and presets can all be saved in an XML format. This makes the configuration of your plug-in readable, editable and portable over all platforms.
• SIMD Optimizations: For maximal performance, Mu Voice is highly optimized using special processor instruction sets like SSE for Intel and Altivec for PowerPCs.