Talk:Utatane Piko (VOCALOID2)/@comment-71.218.228.194-20190318164059/@comment-53539-20190319091206

I wouldn't call the engine bad, it was better then V1 in many respects, with only 1 or 2 things that were not an improvement over V1. Its just you have better now. I personnelly would look at V4 and V5 as these two engines have the longest "lifespan" right now. The issue with V3 is, we don't know what the future holds for this engine.

So the problem is V3 vocals aren't nesscarily all that different to existing V4 or V5 vocals, recording techniques and technology improvements aside, the Japanese vocals hit a brickwall in V3. Aside from 1 or 2 vocals, many of the engines vocaloids ended up being the same vocal type, which meant that they "sounded alike", which was corrected in V4. The fact was simply that Japanese is a simple language with a lot less phonetics then the other 4 languages Vocaloid has done, so has less room to capture "traits" with. The Japanese Vocaloids were made to be "easy to use" in V1-V3, but that wasn't the most effective method of capturing traits of the provider. The V4 method Internet co., Ltd developed and shared with the other studios, captured more traits but at the cost to ease of use.

When people say that Japanese vocaloids are the most realistic, this is really ecause of this debatable. All Vocaloids have the same potential to be realistic due to engine, but the Japanese Vocaloids were the least realistic overall due to this.

Also bare in mind, all of the Vocaloids you suggested are Japanese Vocaloids and they aren't aimed at us. You get the standard "think about what your buying" routine, that I remind people over. If you can't use Japanese phonetics or speak/write Japanese, then Vocaloids in Japanese aren't that useful. Most resort to cover songs or end up making LQ "English" from Japanese, so if you are going to do the latter you'd be better off with one of the multilinguals like Nana or Fukase, rather then a purely Japanese vocaloid. A lot of people in the west who buy Japanese vocaloids, especially weaboos, end up using it as a toy for cover songs or such like and then a year later almost seem to forget they have them. Making Vocaloid a expansive waste of money. But, bare in mind, even professionals intending to use Vocaloid don't always rate Vocaloid very high as the sottware isn't all that useful at times. If you have a real singer, aside teaching the singer real songs or using vocal loops, Vocaloid can be pretty useless and mostly just appeals to the Vocaloid culture itself.

We're also now in the stage of watching the era of Vocaloid be over and things are stagnating aas a fandom in Japan. Overseas is still growing though, but now faster then within Japan. The reason is simple, Vocaloid no longer occupies 1/3 of Nico Video and there are rival software like CeVIO, plus many producers have moved on, among other things.