Sonnox announce Voca
by SonnoxSupport   30th August 2023

It’s not a real Sonnox plugin if it doesn’t have that pale pale blue color in the GUI lol…
This one is gonna feel like the ugly step sister next to the inflator and Oxford EQ haha!!

Jokes aside, if it’s anything like the two mentioned above it’s instabuy

IF the auto leveling is accurate and doesn´t affect the sound it´s an insta buy for me. All the other tools didn´t work properly enough and/or colored the sound. (Waves VocalRider, United Plugins Autoformer or Sound Radix Powair). While I´m writing this I ask myself if the Sound Radix Drum Leveler could provide decent riding without coloring. Never tried that.

I have 156 compressors already . Do i need this one

I can´t find any information on the OS compatibility. I´m still on High Sierra. Any info on that @ sonnox ?

Just bought it. It's very clean. You really need to push hard to get some pumping effect. The deesser is also OK.
@ studioton to me , it replace 3 UAD plugins and grant a cleaner result. I usually have a 76 into a 2a and into a precision deesser on my Vox input. Voca does it a lot cleaner , which might be desirable ....or not. To me, it's useful. They advertise a zero latency in recording mode but I haven't tried it yet.

Price?

Hi!

Voca is compatible with macOS 10.12 or higher.

Hope this helps!

£71.20 on introductory discount.

Levelers will never work because the release time is never short enough to not lay on top of and bury the next subsequent transient.
I learned that the hard way. You gotta use faders and automation.

Maybe this is advanced and more adaptive/intelligent in its approach. Need to test it. On the other hand there is the leveling in Melodyne which I always forget about. Don´t know why.

It's a lot easier to believe in a conspiracy of the snake oil plugin than actually try it by himself and witness what actually happen.

Trolling seems to be really common here these days.

If ANY plugin company has earned the benefit of the doubt it's Sonnox. All their plugins are immaculate, some of the best in the world.

To chime into a thread on a new Sonnox plugin and use terms like "snake oil" and "magic bullet" just makes a person sound silly.

After 1 year of no updates or fixes for ListenHub, and a buggy Claro plugin that crashes half the time, I can honestly say that I am done with sonnox plugins for good. And you should think of responding to your paying customers once in a while.

Hi FerrousMeuhler,

Firstly, I'm really sorry this is the experience you've had.

Secondly, I've sent you a DM so we can look into this.

I´ve tested it on well recorded vocals and compared it to my other "vocal betterizers" (Leapwings UltraVox & Joe Chiccarelli & Al Schmidt and the IK Multimedia Joe Chiccarelli Vocal Strip) and Voca does the compression with bringing the consonants out very well. Also it´s intuitiv and fast to compare different tonalities. It´s fast and sounds good. Unfortunately the Soften parameter sounds too artificial to me - even in very low settings. It´s like dial in Soothe2 with too much processing. Maybe it would be better if you could focus the processing on the harsh OR the esses separately. The most important feature to me - the leveling - does not sound natural going into the compression. I always preferred it off. So clip gain or automation is still necessary for a natural effect. Especially when it ducks down louder parts it´s too obvious. Maybe some more control over the effect could be benefitial - like doing upward leveling only. With that being said it´s a skip for me although the compression and saturation action sounds good and is intuitiv.

Poor Jack, hopefully you will develop the ability to understand sarcasm when you read an answer in context.

Levellers and faders/automation can be less work than faders/automation alone. Levellers can also make compressors further down the chain have an easier time of it before finessing with automation.

The auto gain does sound weird when you dial your compression and saturation setting on the quiet part and let it slide into the hottest part.
I would suggest doing the opposite for a fluid result.

I also had an issue where the auto gain got stucked at lower level when doing an experiment at unconventional level (very hot). I had to reinsert the plugin so it reset itself.

It does seem to happen whenever it reach a certain ''over the top'' level.

On a normal situation, bouncing my bus confirm that what voca does, it does it correctly.

I just tried this. I didn't use any comparisons. I just loaded it up and popped it on a vocal to see how I felt about it. I am in the pop realm and honestly I feel like this is a super rad tool. Great for my genre. I would say it is pop-leaning but I was able to get a lot of different feels with it. I really love the auto leveling! That made it special for me. Great tool. Will be purchasing. Hip hop, pop, pop rock, cleaner stuff, all day good purchase. I love that it asks me to use my ears as I'm so used to using traditional comps.

EDIT: The auto is pretty decent. I do think it's true that if you have louder parts, it stuggles.

This is such a great point

Thank you

F- it… bought

I’ll try it on a project tomorrow and report back

Tried it on a very deep gothic male voice and a very thin female voice yesterday,
Its hard to overdo it. Very gentle effect on all processors.
I dont find it artificial but maybe thats just me and my ears.
With the male voice I had some problems dialing in the attack of the comp. Because of the amount of bass the singer produces.
But a simple HPF would have fixed that maybe.
Its very simple and I miss being able to adjust attack and release. And I miss a GR meter. But I understand thats part of the simplicity.
So Im at 51% on the buy scale right now.

Sonnox in my experience is one of the most responsive and customer centric company out there. I had a few issues and they were great at dealing with them

I was beta tester on this one so i had time to play with it.
And i think it is very good and ptobably one of the best if not the best in its class.
Leveler are not perfect, but this one is very good.
You should probably do basic gain leveling in the wave before using it, then it works very very well.
The dual comp is excellent, in par with Sonnox expertise.
The saturation and leveler are good too.
All in all, a very good, fast and efficient all in one solution for the vocals

Very, very impressed with Voca. I tried it on a difficult voice (harsh, inconsistent, nasal, etc.) and everything was solved with this one plugin. No need for eq, Saturation took care of that. Soften is extremely effective.
This plugin is very easy to use, intuitive, and deeper than it looks. Congrats!

100%. After listenhub, NO THANKS

I have no problems with those plugins?
Claro had some graphical issues pre the last release but.
What system are you guys on?

I was speaking just to listenhub. it came out last sept I think and was almost useless. Mac sleep would mess it up and require a restart. lots of drop outs. And if you used it over a certain number of hours the drop outs got worse. VSX messed up on it constantly. Overall just unusable. Last time I checked it still didn't have an update. that was a few months ago I think. Luckily slate released VSX systemwide so I just use that and all is well.

Edit: I'm on Mac

I tried it today in a session I am working on. As the last plugin on the lead vocal I had MDW DRC2, which is a leveller deluxe, doing a little bit of upward and downward compression. I felt this was a good use case and a decent plugin to compare it to. For some light final vocal polish. I quickly settled on a little bit of everything and it sounded more crisp and modern - more "processed pop vocal", which suits modern pop music well. DRC2 does not change the source at all, which is its big strength. So, this is not an apples to apples comparison, but rather 2 ways to go. Clean big and true to the source - or flattering/hyping the sound. Vocals get slightly thinner, more aggressive, but many times that is a plus in a busy mix. I will send both files to the young clients and hear what they think. I suspect they will go with Voca. The old dogs might prefer DRC2, I guess. The smoothing effect is the least convincing module and I only went with a few percent. I have many "soothers" and they can all quickly make the sound suck, making it have no character anymore, so they need to be used very carefully. The Voca compressor seemed to be fairly forgiving and I could use a good bit of it, but not a lot of the squashing, I guess close to none in this case. The leveller seems to work fine for already treated, gain staged and compressed vocals for the final touch. The drive sounds nice, but easily gets over the top.