I've heard Melodyne solves this problem very successfully, and the demos look impressive. Any idea what it's doing? Is it patented / secret / witchcraft? Or just has more templates?
I don't have any worthwhile insight, I'm afraid. I expect it's partly high-quality methods, partly a lot of refinement for common inputs and use cases.
Academic methods tend to be trying to work towards a very general problem such as "transcribing a music recording". A tool intended for specific real users can approach the problem from a perhaps more realistic perspective.
