User blog:Angel Emfrbl/Ranking CFM Vocaloids

So I'm bored and decided to rank the Vocaloids of CFM for no other reason then I don't know if I've done it yet.

6th Place
Kagamine Len

They've had 5 releases; Act1, Act2, the Appends, V4x and English.

And of those 5 only the Append and V4x have anything decent about them and the 4Vx range offers the least amount of options of all. So both Kagamines are stuck with the hard luck award and the worst of CFM's Vocaloids overall. So of the two of the Len, Len has always been the worst for his lack of realism being a male voiced by a female and often reported much harder to use. In terms of the grand scheme of things, his Act1 and English are very much guilty of not sounding masculine at all at times, therefore even if this wasn't an issue, the voicebanks are.

The English is also typical CFM lazy done with Len often sounding too much like Rin and both sounding a bit Luka-ish at times (I've always agreed they sound out some lyrics the same way).

To top it off, I've said for a while now the splitting the voice into two Vocaloids is not a great thing in the long run. They ended up with 3 vocals each and if XSY hadn't been retired going forward would have the least amount of options compared to Luka and Miku overall.

To top it off, the Kagamines are the 2 members of the CV series who actually have Vocaloids with similar sounding vocals now who can compete with them and are "better" then any 1 of their voicebanks.

To a point you can excuse Act1 and Act2 for being bad, simply because of their era, but Act1 was bad because its rushed and is the only early V2 vocal I think really deserves criticism.

5th Place
Its Rin.

Same reasons as above, except Act1 and English were stronger then Len's.

So she is a spot above.

4th Place
Megurine Luka.

Messy, V4x with a lot of experiments that failed. The EVEC system is crappy and with XSY gone in V5, its now lost half its purpose. There are only really 2 voicebanks; Solid Japanese and Straight English, while the rest don't offer either much difference or are repeats of these two. Soft feels just like Solid with a bit more looseness. The package gives the illusion of something great while gives you many little rubbish vowel swapping EVEC.

The saving Grace of Luka is that overall the Solid Japanese vocal isn't too great, though sounds not muchlike the V2 vocal and the V2 vocal was a decent voicebank. The rest is pretty shubby, but to be honest... With just 2 releases its really hard to put her below the Kagamines in the rankings because they had 5 and only 2 were good releases, and since there is 6 voicebanks in total behind their "bad" or "disappointing" side, this outweighs Luka by far. It also doesn't sound like the V2 vocal so I don't see 100% the point, but CFM seem to be trying to make Luka sound more like the provider and have dropped their idea a little of the CV series all being voice acted.

Luka English has always been disappointing, but was always including with Japanese as standard, so its not too bad of a position to be in. ou always get at least one saving grace vocal with her. IF you buy them separate in other CFM vocaloids, you can end up with disappointing voicebanks with no better vocals to lean on.

3rd spot
Its Meiko.

So from this point onwards you have releases that haven't really got many complaints to them overall, which separates them from the prior ones.

Not really a CFM Vocaloid but since they handle her these days she counts. 2 Decent releases under her belt and the V1 engine voicebanks couldn't really be judged fairly against the V2 and later vocals anyway as V1 was pretty bad. So Meiko has a good reputation and a decent amount of vocals. The only issue is that she is the Vocaloid in CFM with the most replacement vocals, and a good chunk of them are better overall then any of her 1. And they released her as a V3 with a smaller range and tempo then the majority of the newer V3's were having and its debatable if having 4 as many voicebanks as she has was a decent enough replacement.

Listening to the Meiko V3 voicebanks, I often find their not really much different enough compared to the CV series ones that they wanted ness. all of them. At times I don't always feel they really do much. Even if you want "power" for rock... There is better "rock" genre Vocaloids then Meiko and they have better vocals. It makes it difficult because there just is that many alternatives to her. And I said this was a problem in V3, well its now worst since V4. Eh...

The English is "okay" and is included with V3, its just... not great because CFM typical English just tends not to be.

2nd Spot
Kaito.

No other reason then his vocal hasn't many replacements except maybe one or two of Zola or Kiyoteru as most males are either young or Gackpo. Otherwise he is similar to Meiko, 2 decent releases, just 1 less voicebank then her. If not for the fact the V1 vocal worked well with the V1 engine and that he is one of the remaining Vocaloids in the CFM who doesn't have many competitors in how he sounds, he would be below Meiko.

he has a odd sounding English voicebanks, but I tend not to hold English voicebanks too much against a Vocaloid overall as CFM's pretty bad at making them and this one is included.

1st Place
Hatsune Miku.

She does 3 languages. And while you can call the original V2 vocal bad, it was a product of its time, unlike the Kagamines who were products of rushing. So for half of V2's life approx. it was unchallenged despite being LQ, and had no reason to sweat at all about other Vocaloids. Even then after the better ones did come out, everyone was sold on Miku and she has Appends.

The V3 range introduced a English vocal, which was bad and one of CFM's worst, but released all the Japanese ones in 1 way or another and aside from being a single octave lower were not too bad. The issue was that all of CFM's vocaloids had V2 ranges, including Miku, in an era when ranges starting to grow. ITs an issue that Internet has with Gumi, but unlike Internet CFM seems to be slowly increasing the range and in time it may catch up. It may not. Who knows.

But with so many voicebanks for 1 Vocaloid and 3 languages, Miku ends up being the best by default. The only bad voicebank she has can't be too badly discounted (V2 one) and it kinda means... Well...Miku hasn't really had a awful release outside of languages. And V4 English was an improvement over V3...So they at least begun to fix their issues. The Chinese remains the souly bad voicebank of the current 9 they have produced, discounting the updated vocals. You just end up with more options then any other CFM vocaloid and her EVEC was about the most balanced, being improved version of what the Kagamines had with it applying to 3 voicebanks instead of 2, 1 each.

The worst Miku's have to offer is just that her Appends got complaints of not sounding like Miku was singing, and honestly that actually did her a favourite. Dark is the only Miku voice I can tolerate from a Vocaloid I myself can't stand. And I feel thats the issue. The other CFM Vocaloids don't have voicebanks that really stand out from their core as much as Miku's did at times, so you don't always have a lot of reasons to use them. But Miku's 7 voicebanks in Japanese, with them often not sounding like the original at all, means that there is more chance someone will find something of hers they like.

Overall
For me, CFM's got some issues that remain left over from previous generations;
 * Release loop; nothing new comes out of them, just the same thing gets released with a new layer of paint. Thats fine but I prefer studios that do this, plus release NEW voices to keep things fresh.  I want this generation something new.  I like new languages, but I also like new Vocaloids because fresh voices open up new options.  Plus its easier to work with a new Vocaloid because CFM could produce a new one with a large vocal range to have voicebanks that compete with the ranges of the newer Vocaloid generations. Which leads to the next issue.
 * Shallow ranges; it notices that their V4 vocals all had V2 voicebank ranges in an era where the majority of Vocaloids could out compete any of them. I wish they would do more to fix this, as it leaves their vocals with a shallow range which has quality results, and limits the real amount of songs they can do with a single voicebank.  I know they are afraid of what would happen if Miku doesn't sound like Miku, etc, but I just wish they would take the flying leap and increase all their voicebanks ranges by 1 octave.  The root of the issue is they aren't increases the amount of layers each voicebank has and are keeping them the same, while newcomers like Mirai and Una have more to them.
 * Less focus on Miku; impossible. She earns too much money.  But what disappointed me was when they worked on Kagaminee V4x, they made ti know they were also working on Miku V4x.  So when production of Kagamine V4x ended Miku had their sole attention but this was not given to the Kagamines V4x release because of them working on Miku V4x.  This... Needs to basically stop.  While I do agree you can afford to have multiple voicebanks on the job, the Kagamines needed 1 more voicebank each to compete with Luka and Miku with how many options they individually offered to compete with the EVEC of Luka and voicebanks no of Miku (5).  The Kagamines ended up with 6, but as I said either that means they now end up with half the content of their fellow CV series vocals. More... Could have been done, like if you weren't going to add another voicebank each and keep the release at 6, then their EVEC should have been better.  Instead Miku had 3 EVEC voicebank capable and the same EVEC options tweaked to be better.
 * Short cuts; stop. With. The. Shortcuts!  No more just taking a voicebank and adding softness and the other crap!  Actually record a soft English voicebank instead of manufacturing one.  This isn't even the only example, as they are know to be one of the studios who will re-use samples from past sources.  Internet seems to have stoppe d doing this as of Megpoid V4 as all 5 voicebanks were fresh recordings entirely as far as we know. What happens when you re-use the old stuff is simply that you don't add new traits and voicebanks end up even more similar sounding. But this isn't just that, CFM edits their samples to make them sound how they want to, so every so often you heard a sample that doesn't sound ness. natural.  They don't do this to Meiko and Kaito, but they will do this to their own Vocaloids.
 * Better langauges; Appends... And the act of moving away from 1 octave releases. I know they are improving things with each new release, but so far every vocal fresh into a langueg for the first time has been with a lot of issues.  From Luka V2 being LQ because of missing sounds, to vocals not sounding or matching the ranges of their Japanese counterparts... To just overall LQ and having simple things like background noises.

I don't know if I'll do this for the other studios ah software, Internet, Zero-G, PowerFX. I wouldn't do Gynoid with 2 new voicebanks on the way still and they'd therefore be judged on just 2 and I can't fairly judge Chinese voicebanks as I know little on the language.