RUBY (VOCALOID4)


 * This is an article about the Ruby software for the VOCALOID4 engine.

2013
Ruby started as an independant project in December 2013 with only Prince Syo working on her. Half a year later, he was joined by Anders from VocaTone. Despite Anders helping Syo, a development team did not exist, since Syo for the most part exclusively worked on Ruby.

At some point, Syo searched for companies that could support Ruby. PowerFX, Zero-G and Crypton expressed interest in the project. It became clear that Crypton would not allow much creative freedom at all. Anders thought that Zero-g and PowerFX would be better candidates because he had worked with and trusted them. The two chose PowerFX because they would allow more control over the design. Anders later remarked that at no point was anyone promised any control over the final design and that it was his decision to choose PowerFX.

2014
On September 19th, 2014, Syo publicly revealed that he and Anders were working on a VOCALOID and a voice sample of Ruby was posted. At the time, Ruby was affilated only with Vocatone, but not PowerFX. However, Bil Bryant, the CEO of PowerFX, revealed in October that Ruby would be delayed so that she could be updated to the VOCALOID4 engine.

On October 30th, Natasha Allegri posted pictures of concept. It was revealed that her and another artist had been requested to submit concept art for consideration. At the time, it was not confirmed whether the concept art would be used in Ruby's final design or whether either of the artists were going to draw the final design.

2015
Early in the year, some early production samples of Ruby were discovered. Syo explained that these test audio clips were not the original uploads of those samples. They had been removed and someone else re-uploaded them. However, there was no objection to them existing so long as everyone acknowledged that they were of early versions of Ruby's vocal and that they did not reflect the current status of the project.

It was announced that Ruby would be associated with PowerFX.

Syo expressed a desire to create at least two voicebanks for Ruby to take advantage of VOCALOID4's cross synthesis capabilities, but was unsure due to the doubled workload. The extra workload was owed to the increase in triphonetic data. In addition, PowerFX was only willing to pay for one English vocal. He confirmed that PowerFX wanted to see how well the English voicebank sold before adding any additional vocals. It was also confirmed that Ruby originally had a Japanese voicebank, but this was scrapped due to increased workload after the transition to V4 and the possibility of having to pay for a license for each voicebank. Her English recordings were redone to sound similar to her scrapped Japanese vocal.

On June 10th, Syo asked for original songs that he could use for Ruby demos. He gave a week as the deadline. Examples had to be sent in, of which Syo would tell them if the song would be accepted as a demo.

It was confirmed that Natasha Allegri's design would be the final art on the physical copy of Ruby, after resolving some miscommunications with PowerFX.

Syo expected her to take 1-2 weeks to do the art and was surprised that she produced the art in 3 days. Natasha commented that doing the art made her "very happy".

On September 18th, Syo tweeted that Ruby would be released within the month. Later that day, he tweeted that the release date of the download version will be the September 23rd. Boxed versions would be available afterwards. On the day of September 23rd, it was noted that she was releasing within ten days of the intended date.

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