Just got the $69 Melodyne Essential offer in the email...well, this is sweet. Am I the only one a little rankled by the fact that a few months after I purchased Assistant for $249, they release a product that does almost the exact same thing for $180 less? I definitely would have gone for Essential, had I known it was in the works. The feature gap is pretty damn small between these editions.

(If you could make keyboard shortcuts work in plugin mode, I'd be 90% less furious! Gah!)

Hello fakemoneynyc,

I'm sorry that you are piqued at this. I don't know when exactly you bought Melodyne assistant, but Melodyne essential is available as a purchasable product since October. Technically, it isn't even something we had been working on only recently, it has always been around. Melodyne essential used to be a free product bundled with Pro Tools, for example. Now we made it available to non-Pro Tools users as well. By the way, the price of US$69 is a special introductory price until December 31. The regular one will be US$99.

Regarding the feature difference, in Melodyne essential, you only have the Main Tool and the two macros for pitch and timing, whereas Melodyne assistant has all the expert tools. While you may consider formants, pitch modulation and pitch drift negligible, they are absolutely crucial to others. I have even read comments that tuning a vocal track without having the pitch modulation at hand doesn't make any sense at all.

Moreover, Melodyne assistant features Audio-to-MIDI export while Melodyne essential doesn't. Again, this is something which some people find very powerful and worth any price difference. But anybody's mileage may vary, I guess.

Now you said that you are pretty new to Melodyne. I am sure the longer you work with your copy of Melodyne assistant, the more you see how useful its additional features are, and you will not want to miss them.

Hey Claudio,

Damn dude, thanks for the response. Honestly wasn't expecting one; just thought this was a weird issue and thought I'd bring it up. And you're right, I'm not being totally fair...i just got caught at a bad time because what I really wanted was something like Melodyne Essential, but I bought it back in September or something, when it wasn't available. As it happens, I do use Assistant's extra features a lot, though they're totally nonessential for my use. It's a few more tricks up my sleeve anyway.

Anyhow, thanks for the totally non-snarky response to my snarky gripe.

Why did celemony take the features that were in the Melodyne plugin 1.0.3 like pitch modulation and pitch drift editing and not put them in essentials and only let plug-in users migrate to essentials at no cost instead of assistant where the features are? and charge for an upgrade?

Hello evets_ztruk,

Melodyne essential has never had any pitch modulation and pitch drift tools.

Depending on when you bought and activated your copy of Melodyne plugin, we offer a free upgrade to Melodyne editor. See this page for details. So basically to many Melodyne plugin users we are giving away our most advanced Melodyne edition for free. I don't know how old your copy of Melodyne is, but perhaps you are also entitled to a free upgrade?