Q: How do I change or assign different instruments to the tracks?

A: At the main window, double-click your mouse pointer in the track and measure location where you want the instrument assignment. This will open a Notes window. This window lets you edit many details for the specified track. At the center of the Notes window, you'll see a piano-roll style display showing blue colored notes. Directly above this is a gray area that is used to display music control events such as Instrument changes. This area is called the Control Data Area. To the left of this music control display is a popup menu button that lets you choose the specific control type to display.

This button will be labeled "TEXT" or "INST", depending on whether you opened a Vocal or Instrumental track. If this is a Vocal track, press the "TEXT" button and choose the Instrument item from the popup menu. The Button will now be labeled "INST".

If there are any existing instrument events in this track, you'll see their names displayed in the Control Data Area. On the far-left side of the Notes window, there are two buttons that are used to set the mouse pointer mode. The button with a dotted RECTANGLE icon chooses Select mode while the button with the PENCIL icon puts you in Insert mode.

Press the pencil icon button for Insert mode and notice the cursor becomes a small pencil when your mouse pointer is in the Control Data Area. To insert a new Instrument control, simply click your mouse button with the pencil cursor positioned in your music where you want the new instrument. If you want to change an existing Instrument control, move your mouse pointer somewhere over the Instrument name text and the cursor will change to an I-beam. This means you'll be editing the existing Instrument control instead of inserting a new one.

Either way, you get a dialog box letting you chose an Instrument. If it's an Instrumental track, you're shown the GM bank. If the track is Vocal, the displayed dialog options are the singing voices.

Q: Can I import lyrics from an external text file?

A: No. Unfortunately this is not something that can be done automatically. It would require a fairly complex editor to allow the interaction needed to really make this work.

Q: If I can't import lyrics, then what's this "Imported Lyrics" window about?

A: If you open a MIDI Karaoke file (".kar"), the lyrics will be extracted and shown in this window. You can use this window when you manually enter the lyrics in a Notes window. The author spent a lot of effort trying to automatically import the lyrics from these files, but failed. The KAR format was made for crude visual display and is not robust enough for automatic synthesis.

Q: Can I plug your internal synth (VocalTracks) into other sequencers besides VocalWriter?

A: No. Under current specs, singing breaks MIDI. In addition to specifying the note to sing, the synth also needs to now how long to sing the note, what the next note is, and finally it needs to know the next syllable so the vocal tract model can correctly articulate the transition. It's the same for human singers. MIDI and all current sequencers can't handle this. Hopefully in the future there will be enough interest in synthetic singing to grow the MIDI spec beyond its simple ASR model.