Clone Ensemble Voice Trap

The Clone Ensemble Voice Trap plug-in is one designed for removing the vocals from a mix or for doing the opposite in isolating vocals. It's a shareware plug-in, but looks like it'll cost you a small fee to get the full version. I haven't had this plug-in for a few years since I no longer have a compatible system, but I seem to remember this being free at some point or another. If you do get the plug-in, it's not the most straight forward as the parameters aren't going to be anything typical. At least for me I remember it taking a while before I could get it to do what I wanted. It's laid out nicely, but you'll most likely have to mess with each of the parameters to figure out exactly how they'll affect your sound. It is possible to do the job, however. I don't know if a manual exists for this, but you can get one I'd recommend it.

SUITABILITY/PERFORMANCE

The Clone Ensemble Voice Trap plug-in is only available for Windows operating systems and in Direct X and VST formats. For this reason I don't have the plug-in running on my current system, but rather used to run it on my old Hewlett Packard Pavilion dv8000 Notebook and in Cubase SX 2.0 primarily. This computer had a 3.0 Ghz processor and 2 GB of RAM to work with, which was enough to run this without problems in single instances only.

OVERALL OPINION

The Clone Ensemble Voice Trap plug-in is actually pretty effective for taking the vocals out of a mix. The plug-in isn't exactly free for the full version, but it's real cheap to get the full authorized plug-in although there is a limited one for free. I didn't use this plug-in all the time when I had it, but a few times I did want to use it to try to get rid of a vocal from a mix - I've never tried to isolate a vocal from a mix with it. While wasn't 100% effective, as I don't think you can really get it out all the way without affecting the overall sound, it still did an okay enough job for what I needed it for. I don't know how this would stand up against a more modern version of this type of plug-in, but at least check out the free version of Voice Trap if you're interested in something like it.