Sound On Sound - May 2013

RVP2 is obviously a niche application: its raison d‘étre is to match the timing, pitch and level of one audio signal to that of another, and — qualifications aside about how hard you can push the processing if the guide and dub signals are very different to start with — excellent results can be achieved very efficiently. However, do note that while RVP2 can match pitch and timing between two audio tracks, it doesn't correct pitch in the same way as Auto-Tune or Melodyne. What RVP2 does is perhaps best described as ‘pitch matching‘ rather than ‘pitch correction‘.

At £499, this is unlikely to be a casual purchase for most people (although at the time of writing, the introductory price is 25 percent less than this and there are also upgrade paths from VocAlign), so who should be putting RVP2 on their shopping list?

Obviously, anyone doing dialogue replacement professionally on a regular basis will want to investigate Revoice Pro sooner rather than later. It is also a very interesting and powerful tool in a musical context for generating doubled and multitracked vocals, and getting backing vocals to fit with a ‘master’ track. Whether it's a ‘must have‘ for this function is a more difficult call, as most DAWs now have something in their armoury that allows you to attempt this kind of thing; some, like VariAudio in Cubase 7, even allow you to re-pitch the double-tracks to create harmony parts. RVP2 doesn't allow harmony generation, but for automatically generating and tightening up double and multitracked vocals, the results are as good as I've heard from software. If you work with vocals a lot, I suspect the same efficiency argument applies as for ADR work. Whether it is for ADR or vocal production, if your budget still has a little slack in it, downloading RVP2 and requesting a trial licence will soon allow you to evaluate the cost-benefit relationship for yourself. Revoice Pro 2 may well be a niche tool, but within that niche, there is really nothing to match it.