So there's five generations of Vocaloid:Topcheese wrote:You mean like this? It might be just for the libraries, but I thought the editor/player was free.GearNostalgia wrote: Sadly Vocaloid is to expensive for me in a forseeable future, do they ever have sales btw?
https://zero-g.co.uk/collections/vocalo ... b2d3a741f8
V1: Discontinued so there's not much point of talking about it, but the voicebanks that were released for V1 are LOLA, LEON, and MIRIAM for English and KAITO and MEIKO for Japanese, and these voicebanks cannot be used in V5 under any circumstances (KAITO and MEIKO did get updates for V3 so if you want to use them in V5 you have to buy that version)
V2: Also discontinued right before the release of V5, but very significant in the history of Vocaloid because this is the generation which Hatsune Miku came out in and single-handedly made the software into a cultural phenomenon in Japan, probably allowing the software to last until today (also what caused western media to start misrepresenting Vocaloid as a "singing robot" and also what caused the dedicated Vocaloid userbase to be so distant to the outside music world, but that's for another day). All of the Japanese voicebanks that were introduced in V2 have since gotten updates in V3/V4 so you can legally use them in V5, but none of the English ones have.
V3: Introduced triphones to the engine while also fixing some general weirdness and unfortunately removing the VST support V2 had, which caused a surge in updated rereleases of V2 voicebanks just so they too could have triphones. What's even worse about the V3 generation however, is that on the Japanese side there were a lot of new voicebanks who sound similar to each other that were clearly just trying to cash in on Hatsune Miku's success, while on the English side the companies realized that the only ones who are actually buying Vocaloids were the enthusiasts whom lie around the 14-21 age demographic and therefore started catering to them in both marketing and voice types, which meant no more specialized voicebanks like Tonio and Prima. On the bright side however, this is the generation where AVANNA (a perennial staple of the English Vocaloid community and the one used in Porter Robinson's Sad Machine was introduced, where Chinese/Spanish/Korean voicebanks were introduced, and also a bit nostalgic for myself since this is the generation where IA first came out, my favourite Vocaloid and the voicebank that helped me got past Hatsune Miku's shadow and introduced me to the community (and by proxy music production) proper.
V4: Widely derided on release because it looked exactly the same as V3 but with Growl and XSY, most of the releases in this generation were rereleases, with the few new releases either becoming instant community staples (Otomachi Una, LUMi, DEX, DAINA, Cyber Diva, Xingchen, RUBY) or left to obscurity. Also the one where vflower went from buggy joke-tier in V3 into Top 3 of most used voicebanks in Japan.
V5: The current generation, caused a huge rift in the community on release since on the surface it was so different from the previous generations and designed more for newcomers rather than veterans with the presets and all, to the point where some people threatened to quit because it was insulting the legacy of Vocaloid, but then the controversy swung the other way when people discovered that under the hood V5 is very similar to V4 but with Vocal Fry and removed XSY. And as another departure from the previous generations, this is the generation that introduced Standard Vocals, which intrestingly enough due to the culture of the community by this point immediately got fan-art in droves, with most of them actually looking better than the original art. Aside from them, the only voicebanks that are officially V5 so far are CYBER SONGMAN II and CYBER DIVA II for English and VY1 (who suffered the most with the jump to V5 since her V4 was all about showcasing XSY, which meant that she lost three voices in transition since those voices were made to be combined with the main voice with XSY) and VY2 (joked for years as the one Japanese voicebank that would never get an update) for Japanese, with the upcoming Haruno Sora joining them soon.
^this.IncarnateX wrote:FWIW Wagtunes
I am from a generation where quantised and mechanised electronic music was new and fresh and never heard before. Groups like Kraftwerk, Depeche Mode, Yazoo, Human League, Tangerine Dream, Alphaville and later Nitzer Ebb, Front 242 and Frontline Assembly taught me to love those mechanical, industrial and futuristic moods. When the sampler workstations arrived and some musicians actually wanted to use them to make realistic arrangements, e.g. working their ass off to make a sampled choir or a sax sound “real”, I thought it was a deroute because the point about electronic music is exactly that it does not sound anywhere near classic instruments. Electronic music is based cold and dead machines that are brought to life by man-machine interaction. The music is a hybrid between something dead and alive, a cyborg, something ugly and beautiful, robots we infuse with a kind of soul. And that is how I feel about Vocaloid. The day I cannot longer recognize it as an artificial singer, it is no longer of any interest in my concept of electronic music.
I have been around your corner in the music cafe and think your use of Vocaloid is charming. As artificial as it should be. There are still words and phrases there could be more pronounced etc. but not to an extent where the artifical flavour should vanish, imo.
My 2 cents and a recommendation for you to continue exactly what you do without further distraction.
Take care, mate.
It's a pointless endeavour trying to chase realism with Vocaloid, considering that even the song deemed most realistic by the community, using a Japanese voicebank (which is phonetically simpler than English), AND also post-processed with Melodyne (the producer said it one time on his blog but then pulled out that statement because "trade secret"):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkLJoFp2UAE
Is still quite far a ways off.
It's much better to use Vocaloids for the types of songs that are impossible/near-impossible for a human to do even with editing like this one (it took people years to figure out how to cover this song):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvnIFo3xMfY
That way you'd have a real niche for Vocaloid to fill.
Sorry I only have 10 posts right now, I had lots of IRL issues to deal with what with college.
