Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-26213067-20150601151815

The VOCALOID4 Editor and it's features are somewhat lacking. Perhaps this is me being a little naggy, but the previous engine transitions were phenomenal changes.

V1 → V2: A huge engine update. The voicebanks lacked the engine noise the old VOCALOID engine had. We had one of the largest line ups here, totalling 35 different voicebanks, most of which sounded far different from each other. The previous engine was very buggy, clunky, and hard to work with. Many things were improved with this upgrade. Unfortunately, V1 voicebanks can't transition over engines due to poor coding.

V2 → V3: Now this update was the massive update of all VOCALOID updates. Triphonic voicebanks were added for smoother, clearer results, though this often came with the price of the bank being a bit more breathy (ex: MEIKO, KAITO). This is were we also got generic voices, but not to say those generic voices aren't good because they are actually very good in terms of quality and how easy they are to pick up. A useful feature here and there was removed, but I'd say overall the engine and new voicebanks did make up for it. We had 3 new languages added to this engine; Korean (though it is VERY underused), Chinese, and Castilian Spanish and techincally Catalan, but that is MAIKA only.

V3 → V4: I'm going to get flak for this, as I have in the past. The VOCALOID4 update was the Sims 4 of the franchise. The update was sort of rushed and we got nothing super special like we did with V2 and V3. It should have been released, in my opinion, around May 2015 instead of December 17th, 2014 (aaaay, my birthday present. :P) This would have also bought time for later V3s to be released, such as the currently in-development Chinese voicebanks and Uni. The lack of new or useful features also has me just wondering what Yamaha was thinking. Unlike V3, V4 only had 1 initial voicebank to choose from at release, that being VY1V4, which isn't a very good starter voicebank when you see the VY series was aimed to be for professionals. In February, we got Cyber Diva, which is (I believe) still difficult for Americans to obtain when they were the target audience. ._. Fast forwarding things, to this day we don't have something that defines this engine. Like, V2 had Miku who pulled the crowd in, along with Cypton's other characters, while V3 had new languages to choose from and vFlower, who really changed things up. It may take a while, but as of now V4 isn't really anything worth purchasing unless you want free autotuning and a cross-synthesis.

Feel free to leave thoughts and opinions on this, but also do so in a respectful way, as such discussions seem to wake up VO from it's bear cave (is it just me or do people see VO the 4chan of the VOCALOID community? OTL)

-Lily 