George from Walnut Creek points us at the NY Times: Could I Get That Song in Elvis, Please? (free registration required) which discusses Yamaha’s VOCALOID technology. Basically, a vocalist’s sound font.

Probably the most realistic quote in this article was the producer that envisioned a future recording session like this:

We’ll see if a set of voice fonts authored at a university lab or a Yamaha clean room will be enough to make this a popular technology. Opening up the means to create the fonts is essential. Unfortunately:

oops.

[UPDATE] The Yamaha site makes you download a random audio player (in Japanese?). So as a service I captured two of the samples here as MP3s:

download
“Kimi no
uwasa”

On hearing these I think maybe we’ve jumped the gun just a little… I don’t think the Bart announcer is quite ready to take on a cotton field spiritual…

[Son of Update] Metafilter took a spin on this one, including an evisceration by ZD-Net in March.

ACID has a checkered past with standards:

• it’s native sound format is Microsoft’s WAV (with a modification known to be ACIDizing which is now an unofficial standard)
• preferred sound drivers were standard Windows (albiet slow to pick up WDM) but they now also support ASIO
• DirectX (instead of VSi) for effects, but VST (instead of DXi) for softsynths
• Window’s DLS instead of the more widely used SoundFont (SF2).

So….. if you want to use SoundFonts with ACID we recommend the cheapest (but solid) VSTi SoundFont player we could find.

[UPDATE] …or free.

Speaking of Computer Music magazine: it’s rather dated in terms of specific applications, but this is a good introduction to SoundFonts.

The SF2 file format remains an important technology in sampling and virtual turntablism.