[captainbeardo]

Exactly this. Complaining about auto-tune is a self report to not understanding what the loaded umbrella term means. Every artist adds some amount of pitch correction to their voice just like they add some level of compression to their voice.

[function_seven]

When a layman is complaining about Auto-Tune, they're almost always referring to the super-corrected version where a voice will snap to the tonal "gridlines" perfectly.

Whatever you can glean from that complaint (that they don't know about the intricacies of music production) isn't really a counter to that. I still think that overly-quantized tones from the vocals sounds like shit.

Kind of like a digitally altered image "being photoshopped" is a valid phrase, even when GIMP or some other software was actually used.

[rogerclark]

The point is that most people cannot tell when the vocal is adjusted to the grid, because if they could, they would be complaining about it on every single vocal track since the 80s.

"Auto-Tune" is meaningless if you use it to refer to anything other than the specific effect popularized by Antares Auto-Tune.