Talk:Utatane Piko/@comment-27820538-20181124075347/@comment-53539-20181128222423

ITs a rather awkward point about the issue with getting hold of Piko these days and its somewhat a grim thing to be the one to break bad news to people who want to buy him.

The other thing about buying on certain sites is pirated versions have been put out as official versions. When it comes to fresh Vocaloids unless they come from the original developers website, no Vocaloid should be sold for a certain amount of money. In V2 the red lights flashed when people found websites selling Miku for $40 when she was about triple that. It turns out a lot of the sites never actually gave you a copy of the software when you bought it. These were fake sites looking to dupe people out of cash by offering a product at a fraction of its regular price. Those sites are still around and when it comes to certain Vocaloids, still act as a tempting offer considering how expensive some Vocaloids can be. So the fact there are not many places left to get hold of Piko is kinda a drawback, especially considering he went on sale originally as download only with no physical copy.

I don't see the big deal worry about him, as I said the HQ V2s ere known so everything below them in terms of Japanese Vocaloids were pretty much MQ and LQ. And because Piko isn't regarded as one of the HQ vocals, your looking at a Vocaloid at best regarded as MQ. The HQ ones btw are; Luka (worst of the best), the Appends, Iroha, the VYs. ITs not a very big list at all and most of them as you'll note are late engine vocals sold from 2009 onwards. The quality of late V2s just were better then 2007-8 vocals by far. As a late V2 though he isn't regarded as a LQ vocal saying that so you do have that bonus. Though saying that quality on impacts so much and the most popular vocaloid Miku at the time was among the LQ end of the spectrum, and her HQ Appends were a lot less popular then her main voicebank was despite the HQ.

One way around the V2 situation is just to buy one of the CFM and get Piapro Studio running though, then you don't need to really worry about the Vocaloid import problem with V2. Trouble is as I've noted on the comments section in the last few days for Piapro Studio its not without its issues. But it is a solution and everything except the V1s works with the software as far as anyone is aware. Piapro just is currently broken in regards to working with Vocaloid5 itself. Plus, despite the issues with the CFM not being the best Vocaloids around, their still all better in the V3 and V4 generation then Piko is so its not that big of a deal. And a number of them come with a "standard" quality English vocal so you get that benefit, though there is better English vocals with Fukase, Gumi and Nana, plus all the Engloids. So its not a great solution, but at least you can get Piko to work with later vocals and it does remove the issue with only sticking to V2 and V3 vocals, opening the options for V4s. Note the CFM lot don't come with the full editor though.