VOCALOID4

VOCALOID4 (mostly commonly shortened to just "V4" in reference) is the current successor to the VOCALOID3 engine. It is still in development.

History
The engine was first mentioned by Bil Bryant of PowerFX during a discussion about Ruby, an unreleased English VOCALOID and its existence was made known in late October 2014.

On the 20th November, YAMAHA made an official announcement regarding VOCALOID 4's release. It was announced that the release would be in December 2014, with a voicebank upgrade for VY1 also planned.

Impact on Voicebank Development
Ruby was due for release at Christmas 2014, but had been confirmed to have been delayed since V4 was due for release "soon".

In light of the news about VOCALOID4, Wat also reacted about Megurine Luka.

Due to the impact Windows 10 had on maintaining the VOCALOID2 software, Ah software decided to relaunch every VOCALOID2 vocal they had produced as a VOCALOID4 vocal. Due to the fact the provider of Kaai Yuki would likely be at middle or highschool level, re-sampling her voice was a problem, thus it was decided to record the voice of Kaai Yuki with a fresh voice.

Releases

 * -|Upcoming VBs=

New features
The new engine allows the importation of VOCALOID2 and VOCALOID3 vocals, though VOCALOID2 vocals must have already been imported into VOCALOID3 for this to work. The new engine includes other features but not all of them are accessible by VOCALOID2 and VOCALOID3 vocals. The new version of the engine includes a "Growl" feature which allows Vocals built for VOCALOID4 to take on a growl-like propriety in their singing results.

Cross-synthesis was also added, allowing the user to switch between two vocals of the same language and voice (vocals from the same Vocaloid) smoothly using a time-varying parameter that will work with vocals from a single Vocaloid together. It will not work with vocals from different characters, even if they are held within the same package. So Anon & Kanon is not possible, however, vocals from VY1v4 would. This feature is accessible by VOCALOID3 and VOCALOID4 vocals, but not VOCALOID2.

Another feature include is Pitch Rendering, which all imported vocals can use, this displays the effective pitch curve on the UI. Finally, real-time input has been included in this version and is another feature which all vocals can use. Other features were also noted by DTM magazine in their follow up page.

For users who had brought VOCALOID3, VOCALOID for cubase or VY1v3, YAMAHA offered a free upgrade fee for each software was added at the price of 5400 JPY. Those who brought the editor after November 10th 2014 also were offered a free upgrade untile June 2015.

Refinements
It has been confirmed VOCALOID4 vocals have a larger number of triphonetic samples.

Known issues
While it is possible to use VSQX files from VOCALOID3 in VOCALOID4, the files saved in VOCALOID4 cannot be used in VOCALOID3.