Talk:Megpoid English/@comment-37433098-20181107054458/@comment-53539-20181107105545

I disagree with the "well made" she is one of the more bug-ridden English voicebanks. Until Fukase she was considered the better Japanese -> English voicebanks. These days both Macne Nana V4 and Fukase outshine her (though not everyone gives both of them the time of day). At the time she was made, the choices were CFM half-effort English. We didn't have Yohioloid on the other side of the spectrum and people were still harping on about the "great" English SeeU had (yeah... Right...¬_¬' ). So considering the limited options, Gumi was good because unlike the CFM she was not restricted to a single octave and actually could sing the normal range Gumi Japanese could. There was some honest effort put on her but Internet co were unable to fix all the problems in time for her scheduled release.

Gumi's accent is a mixed bad, but its pretty much been said by Luka's provider that a non-native cannot produce a voicebank thats as good as a native. The accent gets in the way even if English is a second language and you use it all the time, so fluent or not its going to have problems at a base level. This is why generally native English vocals end up better. I believe Gumi's accent is intended to sound American, however, the Vocaloid engine has a mixe of British and American sounds in it.

Some of the issues related to this is handful of sounds aren't identical to each other with both accents and Vocaloid allows for combinations neither uses because of it. This is why English vocals had among other things a multi-lingual degree of value, since they always have had too many sounds even for English. A lot of the issues are related to the non-native provider not quite knowing how to fully stress sounds correctly, which is more obvious with Miku V3. Its common habit to put emphasis on sounds that don't need it and neglect sounds with do. When it comes to constructing the voicebank itself, a dev needs to know what a native speaker sounds like as English voicebanks have a degree of Frankenstein-ing needed to mash two samples together. So they are not just let down by provider's, but also by developers at times. For example, Fukase's team had 1 person who worked on Cuber Diva... Thats it. They had no idea how good or bad he was in complete, and its a surprise to most that he was as good as he was.

Japanese Vocaloids are not without their problems, but have 1/5 the sound content in their voicebanks and are far more precise, so general y end up being better. They pay in other ways (less room for realism, less room for phonetic morphing, less expression) but Gumi English is unlikely to ever outshine Gumi Japanese. For starters, we are in the era of Vocal synth. decline in Japan and each year there has been a slight drop in numbers of songs produced. This is ironic because things are picking up in the west now and have been for a few years, but certainly its not great. Gumi was, unlike Miku, aimed more at westerners and was obviously made to compete with Miku English and was a test for English Internet co vocals. Its somewhat sadly harder to sell non-CFM vocals due to overall bias in both sides of the fandom (as I mentioned, CFM English has a long way to go so this is a sad situation). This impacts even Gumi. So Gumi English tends to be a more underdog voicebank.

I kinda like it but do agree about the sound situation, having Sonika at my disposal I speak from the heart about how off putting the situation can be. However, people still bought English V3 Miku despite it being one of the ultimate "worst" vocals so far (at times struggle just to sound like Miku). Gumi English works overall better then Gumi Japanese because it can take advantages of the pay-off of a larger voicebank with more room for expressing, which is a issue Gumi Japanese has. But you never get equal results in one language as the other due to how a change of language requires a change of expression methods. I did want Gumi English at one point myself, but I have other priorities now.