From MaximumPC, September 1998

Autoscore Pro 2.0 - Rating: 8 out of 10

By Daevid Vincent

So, you have a voice that shatters glass and sends children screaming in terror, but you still wanna sing that tune that’s been stuck in your head all day? Autoscore may be just the salvation you’re seeking to help free yourself form your vocal impairment.

Using it couldn’t be easier. It simply shows up as just another menubar item in many of the most popular sequencers from companies such as Cakewalk, Passport, Midisoft, Voyetra, Coda, Jump and Howling Dog. After configuring the program to get the maximum signal input recognition from your microphone by tweaking the gain control on your mixer and selecting appropriate voice or instrument style settings, you select the path to your favorite sequencer and launch it from within Autoscore. The program works with any traditional instrument as long as it plays an isolated melody and not chords, and is not obscured by other timbres in the mix. So, don’t expect to take your favorite pop tune and create multiple MIDI staffs from it. There’s just too much going on for the program to discern a single track.

To help the program know what it should be listening for, and in turn produce more accurate results, Autoscore has several preset input-type settings, including guitar, string, wind, and rhythm, as well as male and female voices.

Crooning the syllables "Da" or "Dee" (instead of actual lyrics) at the correct pitch gives the program a tune to work with. Autoscore then converts those pitches into corresponding MIDI events and mimics the timbres back to you in the instruments you have mapped to that track’s channel and port. Our experimentation proved that a piano or other "short attack" sound worked best. The tracking is fast and accurate, although you might not always hear the echoing MIDI event on time – it’s there and intact when you play back the sequence.

For those who actually know how to sing, Autoscore can be constrained to a specific major or minor key, and will play reference tones so that you can tune to it, for musically sensible results. But if you can’t sing, you can still salvage the notes recorded in Autoscore’s sequencer. It comes in two versions, with the Deluxe version lacking a few extra bells and whistles including volume and pitch fluctuations (or bending in MIDI-speak), not to mention it’s $150 cheaper.

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