All posts by TenshiAkari12
NoviStarsRule wrote: CeVIO is owned by Sony, their about page has a link back to Sony Music Labels.
Oh, that part... from what I've seen, that was a partnership with that particular record label for the artists/repertoire on the CeVIO Project side, not complete ownership. Looking at the flowchart, it mentioned that they joined as a song label purchaser only. What's on the flow chart:
「ソングレーベルの一買としてプロジェクトに参加。音楽を中心としたWEBサービス、ライヴエベントの企画など、コンテンツを魅力的に届けるサービスを提供。」
"Joined the project as a song label purchase. Provides services that attractively deliver content such as music-centered web services, live event planning, etc."
I think if they did own CeVIO, it would've been all up in the site's HTML and even the agreements you have when you first install it. I've been digging since asking, and I haven't found traces of this as of yet. Could be one of those harder to find connections, but usually stuff like this would be easier to trace back to.
(Coming back through for a moment)
Wait, CeVIO's owned by Sony...? (I haven't seen any sort of info confirming such, Japanese, English, or otherwise, so if that's the case, I'm asking out of genuine & honest curiosity if there are sources for that.)
In terms of ONE's popularity, like it's been said, that only seemed to be affected outside of Japan. Over there, she's used fairly much (especially talk voice) and has over 2,000 videos in her tag on NND. While it's not quite as impressive compared to other voice synth entities, she's literally the second most used CeVIO next to Sasara (and her 11,000+ videos... huge gap, but from what I've searched, ONE is the closest second thus far). Her only "downfall" in usage elsewhere was thanks to not having a non-Japanese friendly user interface/software to work with. Just the fact that you literally have to change your computer's locale to Japanese in order to even work with CeVIO CS is a huge setback on it's current appeal to many as it is now.
There have been hints in the past that CeVIO would probably see language updates, though. If it happens to be the case in the near future, whether IA English is official revealed to be on it or not, it would definitely be a welcomed necessity for those actually interested but not willing to change too much with concerns to their system's setup.
This was also pointed out by several others feeling like it's going to be a CeVIO reveal: the official blog post stated it as "IA's English song voice" as opposed to how they probably would've used the term "library" to reference a VOCALOID voicebank. "Song voice" is notably used in all the CeVIO singing voice banks released thus far. Not trying to compound any disappointment on this, but with this combined with some noticeably obvious phoneme transitions in the short samples, it's no wonder why it's easy to come to this conclusion.
I'll personally still will wait and see, but it really feels like the writing's on the wall here, and I don't think they'd release it without the necessary updates to have the people that would probably use the voicebank the most actually be able to use it, y'know... that would be a poor business decision, and as adventurous as 1st Place & CeVIO seem to be lately, I don't think they'd be that naive not to have thought that out if that's the case. It's like we tend to forget we're dealing with actual business-minded folks on that end. ( ^-^;)
All I know is, I'm reserving all technical judgement until I can actually get my greedy little hands on that bank myself & see what can/can't be done. There's only so much you can get out of short samples, and considering just about all the English track samples heard on IA/04 are by non-native English users, for me, all it would take is hearing either by someone else who is or play around myself to see if it's possible to work around some enunciation issues that are being heard or we just haven't heard yet.
Personally, I have no qualms either way. VOCALOID started out just as obscure at one point, so I'm not going to hold that against CeVIO & 1st Place for wanting to try something out here... the thought of potentially up & coming software makers not get some footing somewhere is kind of disappointing, as someone who likes to see some trial and error where there's actually room for it. I've been seeing a lot of that hinted in responses around the web to the news as of late just because once one thing is established, it needs to stay that way forever and always, to be quite honest.
I can SURELY understand the disappointment, though. I also still have a yearning for it to be a V4 English bank, since that's something I'm accustomed to using already, as well as many others who came up using IA since her intro in V3. Plus VOCALOID editor just provides a little more customization with phonemes at current in comparison. It's just way more convenient to be able to use her vocals in that format, and it would be more consistent to how the vocal samples would be rendered. That's the main part people lament, and I am right there with y'all. The reason why I'm even still hanging with VOCALOID is because I fell in love with how easy & pleasant sounding IA's vocals can be as a VOCALOID, and that won't change any time soon. (In fact, I still lament the fact that I can't really achieve the same clarity in her talk voice as I've heard in her concert monologues, even just playing around with some things... CeVIO just doesn't have that flexibility as of yet.)
But, as I mentioned on Twitter... 1st Place has laid it plain every time they introduce IA to new audiences: they see her more of a virtual artist before strictly being a VOCALOID. Which is probably why, if indeed confirmed a CeVIO bank, they're trying this out. They have the room to do so now, it's year six and at the very least, it can't be denied IA has at least gathered a decent little following in the years they've been working on her, both in character and voice. They're at least banking on some of us to give it a chance, as well as reach out to newer folks looking for additional options outside of just VOCALOID, UTAU, etc. (Because when you think about it, there aren't very many viable alternatives, especially for English speakers...)
I'm still not too big of a fan of the way CeVIO renders its samples, though, I'm fighting with that constantly in my personal sound experiments, even with how natural sounding the flow of the phonemes are... sometimes I feel like I end up accidentally over processing the vocals when I'm mastering the audio with the amount of VSTs & plugins I fiddle around with for clarity. Despite all that, I'm hoping as time goes on, those sound issues improve along with interface changes and additions for extended usability.
The only way that's going to happen is if they do at least get the opportunity to open up to a wider audience & market to get more input from, and this is surely one way they saw to do it I guess...
Either way, I'm just hoping for the best.
(Back from the dead.)
I think we can now all agree that hashtags are never a solid form of confirmation? Most of the time, they're used so that people of a certain audience that look through that tag can find that information. (Could've sworn that was something learned from YouTube's tag problem in the past, along with other media sharing sites.)
Also, hi. I'm just stopping through for a bit... IA English summoned me.
I know we're at a point where things can't be confirmed now... it STILL could very well be rendered in VOCALOID, they're just not allowed to confirm... but I'm hearing some very CeVIO-like transitions, which have me wondering, too. Either way, I'm ready... but I can't really get a full grasp until we hear a full track.
MeerkatQueen wrote: I think at one point the VOCALOID Store was marketing her as multilingual too. OTL
http://net.vocaloid.com/en/articles/vocaloid_english_voicebanks
^^Yup, and it kills me every time.
I like MAIKA, always had some sort of soft spot for her but I really began warming up to her voice a lot more in recent months. Spanish is my weak point, tho, I have always had trouble retaining what I learned, so that's part of why I kind of shied away from her when she first came out. (That & any other language that uses alphabet similar to English I end up forgetting how to say things... my brain is so weird on that, I hate that, but I digress.)
If I may, as someone looking from the outside in at this whole thing at the moment...
As a former BBS forum admin and moderator myself, yes, admins ARE expected to show patience and restraint. But, let's be real, admittedly there are times where we have gotten to our limits in dealing with folks who have one too many instances of not following through with either rules or suggestions given out at some point. It's natural that folks lose patience over things, we're all human, and it's frustrating to keep giving out multiple second chances in cases like that. So if this is clearly a situation where there has been multiple times that requests have been made to someone, and that person starts out following through but eventually sets them aside for whatever reasons there may be, I can see why at this point the kid gloves have come off with that respect.
To be fair, you have been working hard at making attempts to improve, but I also have been noticing times over the different name changes where you have done stuff like that several times before, especially clearing those suggestions or requests from your talk pages at times (which honestly has been frowned upon in the past, so they HAVE been pretty lenient with you on that, since people have been outright blocked for continuing to ignore and even erasing admin requests/warnings before)... it's a little unfair to expect for those with admin privileges to keep letting issues like that slide if it is something that's affecting the workflow to the extent that has been said. They wouldn't be telling you to stop doing something if they didn't have valid reasons behind doing so...
I'm not trying to overstep any bounds or anything, but that's just the way I see it. We're not always going to agree with what the right course of action is, but one thing for sure, whatever happens from this point, I'm hoping this situation works out & clears itself up.
(Also to note, I don't think that last one is in the context you think it is... something else was going on with that particular user at that point which was non-related to wiki matters, if I remember that conversation correctly...)
My random return.
Things are beginning to feel like deja vu all over again, in a general sense... I'm beginning to wonder if things have actually gotten better around me, or if that's just an illusion...?
Have mistakes been learned from truly, or are things going to wind up going down the same dark road that has been traveled before...?
Will people actually wake up, look and listen to what they're doing and realize how their actions affects others, either positively or negatively...?
Will there always have to be an impromptu clean-up crew in place for the messes we create in life due to our obstinance and unwillingness to listen to reason...?
Will we end up burning bridges due to our desire to prove ourselves...?
Or will we retreat to other comforts when we don't get the results we hope for, even if they may very well be for our benefit and not our demise...?
I wonder about that lately... SO, VERY, MUCH. ( •́ - •̀ )
(All this, because I actually begin working again next week... and other things happening in life. Having mixed feelings because I need the cash and happy with the type of job I'll be working for the duration, but going to miss the time to finish working on things like I have now.)
You have to switch the singer to Miku English if that's who you want to use, otherwise, the editor will just use the voice that the original VSQx file was made for. Make sure you select ALL the parts you want her to sing in the Track Editor, Right-click and go to Singer > Miku English.
(I'm not really a mod here though... TBH, I can't even consider myself an active editor at the moment either because I don't do as much lately since my focus has shifted a bit to other things... but I will try to do a little more from time to time when needed be.)
One last thing... if you're making new pages, be mindful of the lyric sources as well... there have been times where people copied & pasted from other wikis or sites and the Romaji/Romana/etc. were actually incorrect. It's best to listen to the actual song while editing to make sure they're accurate.
Co-signing all the previous replies here. Even the account switching. One would be concerned if it seemed you were having an identity crisis with all the account/name-changing in such a short period of time. It only adds to confusion, which leads to more frustration... and, as mentioned, pretty much looks like sock-puppeting after so many times. Probably in your best interest to stick with one account from this point on. (;・-・)
Also speaking from having actively witnessed past editing sprees that were literally "too fast too furious", try not to put out so many edits at one time that they both overwhelm other editors who check through changes to articles and literally overload the Recent Wikia Activity page to the point it will not load any prior recent activity to those edits. This has happened a few times in the past, and I can at least recall once where the RWA cue had literally started and ended with some of your editing sprees several months ago and the number of times they had to be re-edited by other users and even admins, even after clicking "see more recent activity" several times until the feed "ended"... not only had it caused a surge in the number of pages to be reworked/corrected, it also made it difficult for some folks (like myself) to try to keep up with any other changes by other editors or anons that happened and may have needed edits/undoing from vandalism. In that particular case alone I mentioned, any other previous edits were just bumped off into oblivion, since the Recent Wikia Activity page can only hold so much in terms of the number of changes/edits at a time.
Please... PLEASE, if you're absolutely, positively serious about getting back into editing or adding song article pages again, be sure to pace yourself that's reasonable enough for you and everyone that frequently edits here and actually take the time to review any pages you create as well by checking the article's history, even if you just created it. Taking it slow will not just save yourself from potential burnout and frustration, but others as well... no one is in a race to the top in all this, y'know. Work smarter, not harder.
(And try your best to actually follow through with the advice and requests given by other users from the last few times up to current. It won't look good if you start repeating the same mistakes that has lead to where we are now...) ( ^-^ )
@ Anon 50: Perhaps it's because, like Angel stated in the first place, people are consistently still pushing it as fact and not headcanon? And in turn, end up coming to the wiki to "correct" Flower's articles? It very much becomes a problem if people don't state that straight off that it is their headcannon and their's alone, not to be taken as official info. This has happened a handful of times in the past, so seeing people still try to do that from time to time is quite discouraging, especially when it comes to having to undo the vandalism as a result or admins having to lock pages because people are insistent on spreading that misconception.
(BTW, seconding what Katil sai, the term wasn't her own words... that was what someone said their headcannon was.) (・・)
^^ You're actually pretty late on all of that... that was literally the biggest tidal wave within the first several weeks, including trolls & pervs in the mix that have since been banned. It's calmed down a LOT since then, but still has a handful of questionable moments every now and then.
Then again, the only times I'm on now is when I check my notifications to check & clear them or update on any of my own uploads/mention any missed VOCALOID news things...
Sadly, that probably won't happen. Miku is the most recognizable face for VOCALOID, whether we want it that way or not. She's the most likely way of people actually learning what VOCALOID is. This is slightly painful to admit, since I am a huge IA nerd and in love with the creativity concept that moves the software into the spotlight as well, but that's something that can't be changed. CFM has had the luck of the draw since her conception, as well as the time to build up her popularity to the level it is right now thanks to the fans and musicians that grew to appreciate what she is to them. To say that it is not relevant to VOCALOID now would actually be misinformation in itself sadly... I myself just wish they'd do more to highlight the fact that the CFM VOCALOID Crew aren't the only ones one day, and that's more likely to happen rather than the nixing of Miku Worship altogether.
Really, as much as we as fans and VOCALOID users would want to see more news coverage on the actual product, other VOCALOID or concept of VOCALOID and that alone, it can't be explained without using the most noted features that ARE actually face value points that new people see first.
(Which is why I'm also rooting for VocAmerica to be a success as much as it can be.)
A couple of others out there as well, trying to find them again.
EDIT:
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/hatsune-miku-the-worlds-fakest-pop-star/
And even though this one is NOT by a paid writer: http://www.dailytoreador.com/opinion/johnson-virtual-musicians-endanger-music-s-future/article_c906d064-5411-11e4-9490-0017a43b2370.html
I'm not trying to say the article is perfect or anything, but at least it's way more neutral than what older web/internet news articles were when they first came out.
...?
I honestly don't see what's so cringey about that article? Considering that far worse has been said about the concept of VOCALOID, that is actually one of the more positive and accurate ones I've seen. (Not the best way to word some things, but at least they even bothered to mention the software and creative concept at all, unlike previous years where writers have written on more of the lines of "anime hologram apocalypse coming to take our RL pop stars away, we are complete screwed" and all those other misconceptions... (•-•)
@Scintillarescenza: It's not just on mobile, I'm on my computer and seeing the same deal here, especially with this thread (Using Chrome to browse currently). Usually it floats back to the top, but it's pretty much stuck now...
There's a common misconception that Japanese VOCALOIDs in general ARE more natural in comparison to other languages. Truth be told, that isn't the case. They're just as robotic sounding as others in languages, just ask anyone who is a native speaker or has listened to or spoken the language long enough to notice the difference. Japanese VBs may seem a little easier on the ears in comparison when non-native folks listen to them, but mainly because, like Angel mentioned, Japanese in general has way less phonemes, in turn making less phonetic data to deal with in Japanese VOCALOIDs, plus doesn't deal with end consonants like English or other languages that have them does... but that shouldn't mean that it equals "more natural" automatically. It's just so much easier to say that "X-language VOCALOIDs sounds more natural than Y-language," when it's a language one may not even be completely familiar with... seems to be one likely answer why so many default to that way of thinking when it comes to this subject.
I'm kind of confused as to how Honoka from DoA5 even got mixed up into all this in the first place, because her VP isn't even the singer in the track (Ai Nonaka)... HannaH (the actual singer in the track) was the person that was contacted via twitter, but there are no further tweets on that, or nothing noting any further details.
Guess we can chalk this up to getting caught up in the moment of excitement for something? If there are any sort of future endeavors made by the user in question to pursue any sort of future VOCALOID creation-related projects, it's probably best to let them be the ones to bring it out, as not to cause too much misinfo and speculation for them down the road. (^-~)
(Pardon me for this... I honestly hate being Debbie Downer in situations like this, but after previous attempts that just did not work out, it can't be helped. Something seems really odd here.)
Until there are either some valid source links or the parties involved actually release this info publicly (or even better, actually get an opportunity to get things set up to do so), can't blame anyone for being suspicious. Honestly, I most certainly am at this point.
It's really fishy how this info is out like this (like the name, the type of voicebanks, and throwing Crypton out there when people could very well get in contact with them and make a query on the subject), yet no one involved has even remotely hinted at this publicly. If this is a true project, having revealed all that "info" this at this point and time may have very well done a lot more damage to what they could be trying to do, as clearly seen from past instances of fan-based kickstarters. As Shiny Articuno said, there's already a huge loss of faith in kickstarter projects after previous ones have either failed to lift off, or in a few rare cases were pretty much scams from the beginning...