Robots that can talk. Basslines that talk. These are some of the magical possibilities when you start fucking with a vocoder. And to help you to make it sound like you’re collabing with Stephen Hawkings on vocals, we’ve put together an exquisite list of both premium and free vocoder vst plug-ins for you to grind your teeth on. Woop woop!

1. Ambe+2 Vocoder Software Libraries
2. Ambe Vocoder Software
3. Ambe Vocoder Software Downloads

Oct 24, 2017  Opus 1.2 open source audio codec was release a few months ago with the ability to deliver low power low high-quality audio bitrate for speech with bitrates as low as 12 Kbps. Digital Voice Systems (DVSI) claims to have gone even lower thanks to their AMBE+2 vocoder (Advanced MultiBand Excitation) providing high-quality speech at data rates from 2.0 to 9.6 kilobytes per second.

Fun Fact: The Vocoder was invented by Homer Dudley at Bell Laboratories in the mid-30’s of the last century. Tasty!

First, let’s mention the premium plug-ins, as these are generally the best in terms of sound quality. In no particular order, I bring to you:

1. Vocodex By Image-Line(Windows)

The makers of FL Studio have an absolute banger of a vocoder plug-in – Vocodex. The mighty AEPH reveals in a recent interview on BassGorilla.com that he often uses Vocodex on basslines created in Native Instruments Massive, for a more vocalized and fatter bass sound. This is one of the most powerful plugins in this article in terms of features, and has an excellent reputation for the quality of sound you can get out of it.

Key features include a soundgoodizer for warm output and limiting, up to 100 bands, sidechain carrier and / or modulator input, speech enhancement contouring, noise reduction and voice doubling.

2. Vocalizer By Sonivox(Windows)

Vocalizer is both an instrument and a processor. It comes with four spectral synthesis modules that can be routed into each other in any number of crazy ways.

Key features: formant shifting (creates some very unique sounds), over 16 filter configurations, 16 spectral synthesis types.

3. Matrix 2 By Virsyn(Mac & Windows)

This follow up to version one by software makers Virsyn features a 2nd Tone generator for improved speech intelligibility, an LFO for vibrato generation with optional mod wheel control, an improved pitch follower from version 1, 2 new filters, a redesigned interface and is now available for Mac OS X as a 64-bit plug-in.

4. Robotronic By Sugar Bytes(Mac & Windows)

Robotronic is a great sounding and easy to use vocoder which can process mono and stereo input signals, includes sampler and synthesizer and contains quite useful features like Frequency Focusing and Formant Shifting.

And now for the free vocoder VST plugins:

5. TAL-Vocoder by Togu Audio Line (Mac & Windows)

TAL-Vocoder is a vintage vocoder emulation with 11 bands that emulates the sound of vocoders from the early 80’s. This vocoder is optimized for voice processing and includes some algorithms for consonants to make the voice more intelligible. The carrier signal is a VCO (Voltage Controlled Oscillator) with a Pulse, Saw, Noise and SubOsc. Key features:

• 11 band vocoder engine.
• Internal carrier synth (pulse, saw, sub osc, noise, mono, poly, portamento, sync mode, tune).
• Harmonic control (adds more harmonics to any carrier signal)
• “Ess” enhancer for a clean understandable voice, also with a carrier that hasnt much high frequencies.

6. Talkbox by mda (Mac & Windows)

MDA has an impressive 25 free plug-ins that you can download as one bundle for Mac or Windows, and the Talkbox is one of the plugins included with this bundle. Talkbox is a high resolution (albeit pretty simple) vocoder. It is not a feature-rich plug-in, but you can get some great sounds out of it if you experiment, and it is useful to have this in your artillery if you like to use a range of vocoders on different vocal samples or bass sounds for example. It gives a more natural and less electronic sound than other vocoders mentioned here.

7. Vocovee by g200kg(Windows)

Vocovee is the VST ‘Effect’ version of the VOCOV Vocoder. It doesn’t allow sidechain vocoding, but can do low latency vocoding. It is worth using this instead of Vocov if you need real-time vocoding. Vocovee has a improved built-in synth.

….aaaaannnnd, why not one more for good measure….

8. Sonicism vintage vocoder DX(Windows)

This vocoder is a DirectX plugin. You can use it in Wavosaur with a VST-DX wrapper, such as ffx4 by VB Audio.

Thanks for reading this and if you know any other great vocoder plugins, leave a comment!

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Multi-Band Excitation (MBE) is a series of proprietary speech coding standards developed by Digital Voice Systems, Inc. (DVSI).

Overview[edit]

In 1967 Osamu Fujimura (MIT) showed basic advantages of the multi-band representation of speech ('An Approximation to Voice Aperiodicity', IEEE 1968). This work gave a start to development of the 'multi-band excitation' method of speech coding, that was patented in 1997 (now expired) by founders of DVSI as 'Multi-Band Excitation' (MBE). All consequent improvements known as Improved Multi-Band Excitation (IMBE), Advanced Multiband Excitation (AMBE), AMBE+ and AMBE+2 are based on this MBE method.

AMBE is a codebook-based vocoder that operates at bitrates of between 2 and 9.6 kbit/s, and at a sampling rate of 8 kHz in 20-ms frames. The audio data is usually combined with up to 7 bit/s^{[citation needed]} of forward error correction data, producing a total RF bandwidth of approximately 2,250 Hz (compared to 2,700–3,000 Hz for an analogue single sideband transmission). Lost frames can be masked by using the parameters of the previous frame to fill in the gap.

Usage[edit]

AMBE is used by the Inmarsat and Iridiumsatellite telephony systems and certain channels on XM Satellite Radio and is the speech coder for OpenSkyTrunked radio systems.

AMBE is used in D-STARamateur radio digital voice communications. It has met criticism from the amateur radio community because the nature of its patent^[1] and licensing runs counter to the openness of amateur radio, as well as usage restriction for being 'undisclosed digital code' under FCC rule 97.309(b) and similar national legislation.^[2]

The NXDN digital voice and data protocol uses the AMBE+2 codec. NXDN is implemented by Icom in the IDAS system and by Kenwood as NEXEDGE.

APCO Project 25 Phase 2 trunked radio systems also use the AMBE+2 codec, while Phase 1 radios use the earlier IMBE codec.

Digital Mobile Radio (DMR) and Motorola's MOTOTRBO use the AMBE+2 codec. Eclipse jprofiler.

Licensing[edit]

Use of the AMBE standard requires a license from Digital Voice Systems, Inc. While a licensing fee is due for most codecs, DVSI does not disclose software licensing terms. Anecdotal evidence^{[citation needed]} suggests that licensing fee begin from between $100,000 to $1 million. For purposes of comparison, licensing fees for use of the MP3 standard started at $15,000. For small-scale use and prototyping, the only option is to purchase a dedicated hardware IC from DVSI.^{[citation needed]}

DSP Innovations Inc. offers a software implementation of APCO P25 Phase 1 (Full-Rate) and Phase 2 (Half-Rate) codecs as well as DMR and dPMR codecs. A technology licence from DVSI is required.The patent for IMBE has expired.

Alternatives[edit]

Ambe+2 Vocoder Software Libraries

Codec2 is an open source alternative which uses half of the bandwidth of AMBE to encode speech of similar quality, created by David Rowe and lobbied by Bruce Perens. Codec2 still continues to evolve, with additional 'modes' being developed, refined and made available on a continuous basis. This has resulted in an open source codec that has progressively increased its robustness and performance – when subjected to some of the most challenging RF and acoustic environments.^[3]

References[edit]

1. ^US 6199037, John C. Hardwick, 'Joint quantization of speech subframe voicing metrics and fundamental frequencies', issued 2001-03-06, assigned to Digital Voice Systems Inc
2. ^David Rowe. 'The Codec2 Project: Next-Generation Audio Codecs and Vocoders for Two-Way Radio'. Retrieved 16 February 2012.
3. ^Bruce Perens. 'Codec2'. Retrieved 9 May 2012.

Ambe Vocoder Software

External links[edit]

Ambe Vocoder Software Downloads