#i still like the old vocaloids but 5 and 6 just aint it

[lesbian-forte]

Criticisms of Vocaloid and why I like SynthV

I'm not trying to change anyone's mind here, but I would like to say my piece after certain takes seem to miss the point entirely. This might be a bit of a rant.

Vocaloid has gone stagnant in recent years. Yamaha doesn't care. Yamaha doesn't need Vocaloid and is a large corporation that gets much more money off of their DAW software and actual instruments as opposed to something as niche as vocal synths that are both only big in Japan and also only if they're in the top ten or so.

Yamaha stopped putting effort into Vocaloid during the V4-V5 transition. There is a reason V4 has so many cancelled voicebanks. Several developers were working on V4 and Yamaha rendered their devkit suddenly worthless. Devs would have to purchase a V5 devkit and start work over, or quit Vocaloid. And as vocal synth companies are generally very small, few of them would want to continue or even be able to afford it.

So they moved. Miku splitting off for Piapro gave them an opening, and others started looking for alternatives. Then IA went to CeVIO. And more and more. And by the time V5's sun was setting, all the third parties that worked on that were gone too.

But for a while, you didn't hear much from most of them. If a company released a V4 at the tailend of its lifespan or a V5, they had to wait for exclusivity to expire. And Yamaha's exclusivity deals are harsh (ending distribution of existing song voicebanks in the case of utaus with the same VP) and long, borderline predatory. So voices that companies wanted to update couldn't receive them until those expired, or else refresh that deal and stay constrained by a company that didn't even want to bother with them.

So, come V6, Yamaha was desperate. Internet Co had made an ultimatum that if a Vocaloid 6 didn't come out soon, then they'd be going too. That was their last, and after Crypton packed their bags, most important third party. So they accelerated their plans and looked at what the new guys were doing to be so successful.

They took the wrong lesson.

AI is not inherently better. Sample-based voicebanks will always have their place. Traditional samples can allow an unnaturally large range and harsher voice acting than would be possible to maintain. AI is more accurate to the voice provider, and you have a greater degree of freedom with its tone, plus updates and additional features are so much easier- but Yamaha took 'AI' at face value and made a low-quality copy that sounds significantly worse than prior Vocaloid versions and pushed it with Gumi. They could have stuck to improving their concatenative synthesis render quality further- that's what SynthV started as, R1 was just a very well-rendered sample-based program that is probably just a fancy utau under the hood.

But Vocaloid jumped on the bandwagon by doing the absolute bare minimum and claiming the ear-grating engine noise that can cause actual nausea is remaining faithful to the 'Vocaloid sound' even though styrofoam on the mic and a sometimes pleasant metallic twang sound nothing alike. They didn't improve accessibility, V6 has the same stability issues as V5, and the shiny new feature Vocalochanger is just RVC but worse.

Then, less than a year after product launch, they start up VxB and don't do anything to improve the software they're actively selling. Internet Co themselves called this out in the form of a Gumi tweet. Then Internet Co got in talks with Tokyo6 and saw a possible out, so they gave it a go. They're still under contract by Yamaha so what they can do is limited, but we saw them stray as well. And the result is a much better quality version (though arguably still worse than her V4) despite being an exact port.

We're still getting a Gumi Solid V6 because V6 can't do emotions and they still have to be separate banks, and VxB still got a major update even though it's dying in April with radio silence for V6 development, while CeVIO/VoiSona is releasing 2.0s that get major acclaim like Ci Flower's reputation totally getting turned around, and SynthV is sitting pretty with several voicebanks announced and several coming out in December alone, and the most recent in-progress update including both voice-to-midi (which is what vocalochanger should've been) and Spanish.

I do not like V6, V5, or Yamaha. It could've been amazing for Gumi or Una to get updates so they'd have crosslang (or better crosslang) capabilities, as I work in English. But the result was extremely poorly implemented and Yamaha has made no effort to fix that.

I use SynthV all the time, I'd do the same for CeVIO if it offered crosslang as well rather than just dictionaries and a couple English banks. I'm not against trying new things. But I either want the other programs to have the things to suit my needs in a quality manner that's intuitive to use or for the voicebanks I love to get versions on programs that already do. It's not that complicated.

The jokes and the yammering from rabid SynthV fans dissing Vocaloid can get to be too much sometimes. But you have to consider where that actually comes from. It's in response to suddenly being spoiled with a cheap, accessible, high-quality program when the expensive, poorly constructed, difficult one has been dominating the market with anti-consumer, anti-third party practices for years.

P.S.: Also you can do robotic tuning and mixing on realistic vocal synths, it's called doing the same thing as before and then adding it in post. You think utaites swallow vocoders or something? No, they just use different tools to get the same result as engine noise. Not fighting the voice when you're trying to go for realistic vs manual tuning and adding some very easy effects on when doing it the other way around is better, actually.