Cannot download software via Internet - Needed to enter Password correctly

[cybersal]

On 12/24 I purchased the Vogone software. On 12/25 I received an e-mail which included my assigned username and password, along with download instructions. I was looking forward to downloading and installing the software so I can start trying it out, but was disappointed that I can't get past the logon process.

After several unsuccessful logon attempts (the Network Password dialog box kept popping back up), I clicked on "Cancel" and received the following error message: "Authorization Required - This server could not verify that you are authorized to access the document requested. Either you supplied the wrong credentials (e.g., bad password), or your browser doesn't understand how to supply the credentials required." I made sure I was typing everything correctly. It accepted/recognized my assigned username (different from "cybersal"; for security reasons I am not providing the assigned username). The network's acceptance of the assigned username helped me to surmise that it's not a browser problem.

I checked out the Forum for possible answers to my problem, as instructed in the e-mail. [Admin snipped out the message about a deleted Thread].

I myself am a webmaster for my office and work with access authorizations frequently, so I do understand and realize that these things happen. I would still appreciate prompt administrative investigation by MTU in this matter.

Thank you.

[admin]

Hello. I have emailed you again. Your username/password in the document I emailed out this weekend does grant access. I don't know what is wrong. I have sent you the email again just in case it was changed in transmission.

The question you asked that I have snipped from your post for security reasons is not the problem. Please read your email instructions from us carefully. You must enter the exact email address that is on that document, and make sure there are no leading or trailing blank spaces or tab characters. Many folks have multiple email addresses. Maybe that is the problem? You must enter the one in designated in the email we sent.

[cybersal]

I received all your e-mails, followed your instructions, but still can't get in. The username/password worked for you but it's still not working for me and I'm POSITIVE that I typed the password correctly as shown in the e-mails you sent me, making sure there are no leading or trailing blank spaces or tab characters.

Since we can't seem to fix this problem on-line, can I get the software sent to me in CD format?

[admin]

I truly regret the problems you are having. I can only guess that your Internet service provider may have some blocking that is preventing the transfer of the access codes.

Yes, we can provide you the code on CDROM. I believe the easiest way to do this is to go to our secured e-Commerce site at https://store.mtu.com and order only the CDROM. Select Payment by Phone or COD (not Credit Card). There will be no charge as our website cannot compute international FREIGHT. We will then have your shipping address from this order and will compute the freight for the CDROM to you. I assume you want it faster than by postal mail, but please email "Douglas" with instructions. I have just emailed him and he might be able to email you first.

Usually we ship International using Federal Express, or UPS to Canada. A CDROM fits in an overnight letter or small box if required to go overseas. We will email you for approval before charging your credit card including the shipping cost.

[driftaway]

I am interested in purchasing and downloading this software
but i have 2 questions:

1. i live in canada and if i experience the same problem downloading, what are the extra charges that i would have to pay?

2. Vogone II, according to your news section is now under development - what will be the cost to upgrade from Vogone I if and when that project materializes?

thank you and i'm anxiously waiting.

jmt

[admin]

Follow the instructions mentioned above and order from the website. Pay by credit card. We will then email you the download instructions. If you have a problem downloading, you can then email that you need the programs on CDROM. We will figure up the freight to you via UPS and email you the total cost. We add any software to a CDROM for $15 plus the freight costs. With your approval, we will charge your credit card for the additional amount and send the CDROM.

You have all the data about Vogone II that we are willing to disclose at this time. The final coding is just starting so I have no idea how long it will take before we are ready to beta test.

Have you ever seen or found any program that can remove the vocals from any song - not just center panned? It is a unique problem and is not easily solved. There are many factors that must be taken into consideration. If we can't turn out a quality product, I expect I will kill the development. So don't get your check book out yet.

Give me an idea of what you think a vocal eliminator that works on any song is worth?

[driftaway]

thank you for the quick reply. From what I can understand, a CD rom order would basically double my cost, hmmm. can i cancel the order if i can not download properly?

i have been observing here in your website the past few months and would really love to use it but to risk $50 to $60 which is close to $100 of our Canadian play money...

how about background vocals, i guess they would also be eliminated? ouch! sometimes they carry the song...

As to what value i could put on a software that could effectively remove vocals whether center... this is a hobbyist's point of view if vogone I is $ 30 then vogone II would be about $ 60...

thank you again and here's hoping that i can my get my hands on this wonderful software of yours.

jmt

[Brian Corr]

In this year of 2001 buying over the net is easy. I dowloaded the files and put them on a CDR to keep for ever.

Vogone does not make any false promises. It will remove the center vocals as explained in the discription. Other more expensive devocalizers only remove to the same degree. If this purchase is for hobbiest use, this is the programme you want.

[cybersal]

Note to Driftaway: In a previous message, I mentioned that I was finally able to download the software with some help from the technical support desk. NO PROBLEM WITH THE SOFTWARE. I just needed to type in the password CORRECTLY! The software works as it was designed to. You can download it from your hard drive to a blank CD-R disc as Brian Corr suggested below. Blank CD-Rs are becoming inexpensive nowadays.

Note to Admin: While you're tinkering with the Vogone II development, I have two suggestions:
1) Is there some way you can develop an upgrade version - as opposed to a whole new version - for those customers who already have Vogone I and therefore pay half price instead of full price (whatever that turns out to be) for Vogone II? Vogone II would probably be worth at least $60.

ADMIN: Target price is $99 ($59 for Vogone I owners) for a total new product, which IMHO, is a give-away. To make it an optional upgrade is adding complexity to the programming that you don't what to pay for.

2) Perhaps you could develop Vogone II so that it offers an option feature for customers to decide whether to eliminate the backup vocals or not, sort of an off/on switch within the software.

ADMIN: I am hoping to have 2 controls that can be adjusted live while listening; 1 for the vocals, and 1 for a second removal (theoretically could be: reverb-echo, background singers, an instrument you want to remove, etc.). However, if we find the second control cannot compute in realtime (along with all the other tools I'm not discussing yet), we will drop back to one. Take heart, you should be able to make multiple passes on a song; remove the vocal on the first pass, remove the echo on the second pass.

[driftaway]

thank you all for the replies and suggestions will try to download my own copy right now and hope i can make it work as you did..
jmt

[driftaway]

just tried to purchase vogone I and went through the motions of ordering and paying by credit card i intend to download the software but you want my full address, i entered all the details but because Toronto, Ontario, Canada is not in the U.S., your software kept asking me to check if I entered the city... you do have the country, canada in the list of countries i tried to put puerto rico as state and it worked but i didn't want to screw up the order so i quit and posted this note

thank you, will probably try again after bug is fixed.
jmt

[admin]

I am sorry you are having problems. Try this... make sure you have something in the City field. There is no "valid city" checking. That would be impossible if you think about all the cities in the world.

Put Ontario in your street address, not in the City field.

We are in the process of replacing our store software. I have been totally disenchanted with eCommerce "experts" who claim to know what to do! It's not that I haven't paid enough money for this store and getting it repaired! However, I made a wrong choice. I have just bought a new and very exciting package. It will be at least a month before it is on-line and operating.

As to pricing for Vogone II... ther is no product able to remove other than center-panned vocals. For home users, I expect to price at $99, with Vogone I users upgrading for $59. BTW: Since we have not completed this "dream program" yet, I can't guarrantee we can deliver! Don't get your hopes up too high yet.

[driftaway]

i finally was able to download Vogone I. Is it really that big? all 134kb of it or did i miss anything? the only thing left is to find the right materials, i've read the other postings somewhere now i know the material has to be center-panned and also not compressed, like mp3 and also no reverb? is that right? is there a recording with vocals without reverb?

i've tried several songs and haven't been successful in any way, partly removed the voice in one of 6 and that is not a good average by any standard. if i downloaded the wrong file, please let me know and maybe if you could clarify all the things that i should not expect to work

disappointed by hoping, jimmy

[cybersal]

Driftaway: This is a question that should (and probably will) be answered by Admin. But I can tell you what I know and have experienced so far.
1) On my Windows Explorer Vogone shows as only 32KB for the application.
2) You'll need to have the audio files in a .wav format for Vogone to work.

I downloaded and tested the demo version of Microstudio to experiment with the reformatting of CD audio track format to a .wav format (I'm planning on purchasing the Microstudio software soon); THEN I used Vogone to reduce the volume of the lead vocals. I was able to partially eliminate the lead vocal, which tells me the song was not a "center-panned" recording. The backup vocals are still present at 100% capacity which was expected.

Assuming that most of the songs on regular audio CDs are probably NOT center-panned, we will experience problems with thoroughly eliminating the lead vocals. Unfortunately for me, there's no way of knowing if a song is center-panned or not until AFTER I've gone through the process. But I can work with it as long as I'm recording over the lead vocal; my voice dominates over the reduced sound level of the lead. But, like you, I would still prefer to have something that would eliminate the lead vocal altogether. Hopefully, MTU will be successful in their development of the Vogone II software as far as being able to work that out on recordings that are NOT center-panned. I'll be one among hundreds (maybe thousands) in line to purchase Vogone II if that's the case.

cybersal

[admin]

Driftaway: You downloaded the right file. To make it easy to download and install our software products, we use a product called Package 4 The Web. Its executable files add about 100KB to the downloaded file size. The benefit is all you have to do is double click it and follow the directions. Before, we zipped our download products, but too many clients did not have the unzip product, plus it was far more complex to use. Why are you upset about the size of our product download?

Success ratio: There is no way to tell what songs are center-panned until you try it. Some gendre songs are more center-panned than others. It is determined by the engineer who does the master mix of the song. Many people have bought the Thompson Vocal Eliminator for $1,600 (now $1,200) and it will not do any better than Vogone I. You should not feel like you have been ripped off. We had one client in the UK process over 100 songs and not one of them was center-panned. If your ratio of 1:6 remains on other songs you want to use, you should be very happy.

Reverb: every commercial song has reverb applied to the vocals. You misunderstood our posts about reverb. We are warning that the echo on reverb is not center-panned, thus do not expect to remove the echo. However, the reverb echo is usually -20dB to -40dB down in amplitude, and as cybersal points out, you can easily sing or record over that. If you want perfection, go to a recording studio and have them generate the music from scratch for you. Cost will be between $200 and $2,000 CAN. Vocal elimination is a very inexpensive option when it works.

What you desire, is what we desire our Vogone II development MAYBE CAN deliver. No other company in the world has delivered this before. I make NO PROMISES AT ALL as to what Vogone II will deliver or whether I will even offer it as a product when we are done developing and testing it. We may run into unexpected problems and have to terminate the development. It will be much more complicated to operate than Vogone I. Total vocal removal will be an art that requires much experimentation and tweaking to get the desired results. We hope to add every possible tool/function that we can to give our users the maximum chance of success at removing a vocal, echo, unique instruments, etc. To what degree you succeed will depend on your patience and abilities to figure out and use the tool. You should not be one of the first purchasers of Vogone II. We will not have time to evolve a total manual explaining how to tweak this, and try that, etc. I expect there will be many posts in this Forum where happy users have "discoverd" that if you do such-and-such on this song it has astounding results.

Knowing the basics of mix engineering, I currently believe there is not a song out there that Vogone II cannot remove the vocal and reverb echo from. However, until we do it, we don't know. We have been making a sizable investment in this product and will be very unhappy if we don't get the success we expect.

If you are with MTU and Vogone I, you need to lower your expectations of the vocal removal process, or buy your music without vocals from others who have done the work for you. That is what the commercial Karaoke producers do for you.

Cybersal: Read my added answers in bold to your post of 3-1-2001 above. Thanks for your comments!

Next question.

[driftaway]

to cybersal - thank you for your suggestions
i will try them as soon as i can figure out how

to admin - thank you for the quick reply but
if i sounded disappointed, not ripped off,
i am only human and that's to be expected.
Please don't scold me,
i'm too old to be scolded and i didn't come
to this forum to argue nor to be reprimanded.

i come back here in hopes that i could get
some response from somebody else like cybersal
and yourself who has tried other things like reduce
the background noise/echo that might work.
think i saw that on another thread, will check it out later.

maybe i put my hopes up too high
on MTU and vogone I
if that is wrong then
I Apologize, dearly

maybe i should have waited for Vogone II
but as you said, it might not come...
right now am 3 foot deep in cds trying to find
that one song i can de-vocalize clearly to
show to my friends and family what i can do
with them. just hope that song is something
that i know and like. Right now, if i could reduce the lead vocals to a whisper then i'll be ecstatic.

I won't be among the first to try
Vogone II, I promise! I waited a few months before i decided to buy Vogone I, read your forums then forgot about
it but someone posted your site on a newsgroup that i read
so i came back and bought one. I wasn't upset with
the size of the program, amazed maybe and the note on the
webpage states that the instructions are in a 134 kb file
which coincidentally is the same as the program file
threw me off.
With regards to the Thompson Vocal Eliminator,
for that amount i can get a decent new cdg player
and maybe 40 name-brand decent cdg karaoke
never been an issue in my mind
never heard of them until you mentioned it
and if i may, i noticed you mention them a lot
do you also sell their product or are they competitors?

well here's hoping that i will have a better success
rate than that person in the UK 1 in a 100 should be
easy to beat!

jmT