Other Cryptonloid voicebank updates, collabs, & concert news (crypton_wat Twitter translations)

[uncreepy]

Crypton hasn't made any official written statements about the details. Because most of use weren't at the event to hear what Wat actually said in person, we won't know until he decides to write a tweet or they make another post. I know yesterday, Wat tweeted thoughts about the first day of Magical Mirai after the concert was over, so maybe just wait until around 10 pm Japan time to see if he says anything else.

Edit:

 

[Jikyu]

Blog post link

View attachment 2258
^ The disclaimer at the bottom says they are currently developing it, so the image might not reflect the final product.
It looks similar to the standalone version of Piapro that came with Miku Chinese (the parameters being blueish).



Geez, what a vague blog post. I thought they would recap the presentation in the post. Hopefully they do that sooner than the end of the year. Glad Amano and Eji took photos of the presentation for us.

Edit: Wondering if we can use non-Crypton Vocaloids in the new Piapro or not.

Yes! I own the Miku V4x English Bundle and Hatsune Miku V4 Chinese so I'm so getting this when they release it in 2020. :D

 

[MagicalMiku]

don't read too much into them, I mean, they won't use Vocaloid 5 for now because the alternatives are better (for what they need now, especially with the Vtubers thing) and probably cheaper in terms of license. That being said, this move from Crypton can push Yamaha making the next Vocaloid engine with some features that weren't planned before :)

edit: I want to add some more things:
- Wataru Sasaki has chosen the stage of Magical Mirai for the announcement in order to announce it in front of the fans, directly, and not behind a blog post. In that way, he could answer any questions from the fans
- he was afraid that the announcement could have taken a negative impact on the fans being there, but thankfully the fans understood the situation and clapped Wataru Sasaki a lot
- relationship with Yamaha is very strong and will continue in the future, but no Vocaloid 5
- it wasn't an easy decision, but with what they tried with Vocaloid 5, the voice just wasn't the original voice anymore.
- the next generation PiaPro studio is standalone

 

[ngoomie]

don't read too much into them, I mean, they won't use Vocaloid 5 for now because the alternatives are better (for what they need now, especially with the Vtubers thing) and probably cheaper in terms of license. That being said, this move from Crypton can push Yamaha making the next Vocaloid engine with some features that weren't planned before :)

why would you put all the time, effort and money into making an entirely different engine if you're just going to go to VOCALOID6 once that comes out? it would be a huge waste of resources. on top of that, with their own engine, Crypton has way more control over which features are included than they do with VOCALOID.

I dunno, maybe I'm misreading your post

 

[uncreepy]

I think they meant that Yamaha would be pressured into making Vocaloid 6 (eventually) have more features and be "better". I guess it depends on what you're looking for in a vocal synthesizer. Something simple vs something you can use in real time.

 

[ngoomie]

I think they meant that Yamaha would be pressured into making Vocaloid 6 (eventually) have more features and be "better". I guess it depends on what you're looking for in a vocal synthesizer. Something simple vs something you can use in real time.

OH, oops, sorry about that, I woke up not too long ago which is probably why I misread that. that definitely makes a lot more sense

 

[MagicalMiku]

why would you put all the time, effort and money into making an entirely different engine if you're just going to go to VOCALOID6 once that comes out? it would be a huge waste of resources. on top of that, with their own engine, Crypton has way more control over which features are included than they do with VOCALOID.

I dunno, maybe I'm misreading your post

because it's what Wataru Sasaki said, he didn't close any door with Yamaha, but said that Vocaloid 5 gave a different voice, and the producers had to tune it a lot in order to have a voice similar (but not the same voice) to Vocaloid 4 and Vocaloid 3.
Wataru Sasaki talked with a lot of respect towards Yamaha,and said that the new engine has no name because they don't want people feel it's a counter version of Yamaha Vocaloid engine.
He is taking great care of Yamaha, and he hopes that their strong relationship, together with today announcement, will lead to further development

 

[lIlI]

I'm intrigued by this VOCALOID5 Miku now, I wonder how different she sounded. Perhaps it was very close to the real Fujita Saki?

 

[Vegetaljuce]

Seems like we won't.

And did I miss something? I just woke up but everyone on twitter screams and is like "CRYPTON DID WHAT??!!"
Did they say that they will leave Vocaloid? I can't find anything on their official accounts.

There goes all my excitement about the announcement. It seems weird to me that they'd go through all the effort of making a new engine but then not allow other companies to develop VBs for it, since I feel like that would make it way more successful. I like the Crypton gang a lot, but most of my fav VBs are from other companies and it's sad to see that they won't be able to jump ship like the Crypton VBs are now going to be able to. Looks like I'll be using Vocaloid4 forever :/

 

[ngoomie]

There goes all my excitement about the announcement. It seems weird to me that they'd go through all the effort of making a new engine but then not allow other companies to develop VBs for it, since I feel like that would make it way more successful. I like the Crypton gang a lot, but most of my fav VBs are from other companies and it's sad to see that they won't be able to jump ship like the Crypton VBs are now going to be able to. Looks like I'll be using Vocaloid4 forever :/

maybe there's a chance the person who responded to the email was referring to other companies' VOCALOIDs when saying no? we didn't see how the question was worded, nor do we know how whoever answered interpreted it. the question may have sounded like they were asking about VOCALOID voicebanks in particular and not 3rd party voicebanks for the new engine
I'm probably just being overly optimistic here, though

 

[uncreepy]

The Next.... NEXT Generation Piapro:
Completely stupid information, but I was looking at Piapro on YouTube and saw that when Piapro Studio came out (2013), they said it was the "Next Generation" vocal editor.


Yesterday, they teased the new engine also as being "NEXT Generation".


So, this is the next NEXT generation version of Piapro.


Why other Vocaloids (including older Cryptonloids) are not compatible with the new engine:

There goes all my excitement about the announcement. It seems weird to me that they'd go through all the effort of making a new engine but then not allow other companies to develop VBs for it, since I feel like that would make it way more successful. I like the Crypton gang a lot, but most of my fav VBs are from other companies and it's sad to see that they won't be able to jump ship like the Crypton VBs are now going to be able to. Looks like I'll be using Vocaloid4 forever :/

They had to manually edit all of the Cryptonloid voicebanks by shortening the clip length and changing the pronunciation to be clearer and less muffled.

They had to do this in order for the new voices to work with Cherry Pie (Cherry Pie is vocal analysis synthesis, it takes the input speech and breaks it down to the smallest unit of speech--phonemes). So if they have a specific unit of measurement (also used by the HMM math equations for the engine itself) for how long the phonemes have to be and had to go through the manual labor or editing every phoneme for every voice bank, it seems like any old Vocaloid (even old Cryptonloids) are incompatible with the new engine.

Add to this issue the fact that Cherry Pie is used for real-time voice conversion built from specific patterns they taught their deep neural network, if the phonemes were too long and not fitting the standard required for clear pronunciation, it seems like the results would sound horrible.


I "enhanced" the teaser image for the upcoming Piapro Standalone:


The most interesting thing I noticed about this teaser is that the old parameter names seem to have been changed and they are split into multiple categories. Oh, and the glue tool is fixed (it's the opposite of the tool to cut notes in two).

 

[GreenFantasy64]

Thanks for the enhance picture and with your thoughts. Can't wait until they fully reveal the picture of the new Piapro Studio and a video demo of it. This is very exciting news after a long wait of silence and waiting. Please, Wat, we want some pie already

This was a good read from Twitter if anyone else is curious.

 

[uncreepy]

I remembered back when V5 came out last year, Wat flat out said they were doing more tests, but it wasn't for V5.

Nevertheless, it's become 10 years since Rin & Len act 2 among other things.... We are now performing voice update tests again. It's not for v5, but.. ※Our company will carry out v5 operation verification information of each DB soon.

At that time, we were speculating the new voices were either 1) Appends for V4, 2) V5 but Wat was lying for some reason, or 3) Some people thought it was a new engine *cough @Exemplar cough*

Edit: Him talking about act 2 made us think it could be Appends to V4. But I guess maybe instead he was referring to the fiasco of not being able to give fans a fix for their voicebank problems easily and having to make act 2 instead to fix it.

So when people at Magical Mirai said Wat said Crypton tried V5 but didn't like the results with Miku's voice, they had known they were going to use their own engine even before the launch of V5. (Because this tweet was from July 18th, but Vocaloid 5 came out on July 12th.)

 

[Blue Of Mind]

It might be the case that other companies' VBs aren't supported right now, but Crypton might be planning to license out the Piapro Studio VB software to other companies in the future.

 

[xuu]

This sounds really out there right now, but this also could be Yamaha essentially giving Crypton their blessing as they slowly pull out of the voice synth game. We already know that Yamaha cut their VOCALOID team down significantly as they went into V5, and if they've allowed Crypton to do this, maybe Crypton will take their place in a few years' time with companies developing voicebanks specifically for Piapro.

Hoping that "late 2019" means more October/November time than late December becuase god knows I hate waiting so long for news, but I expect this stuff to release in like Q2 2020 anyway if they're announcing it now. Please, Wat, give Luka the update she deserves finally.

 

[Wario94]

It might be the case that other companies' VBs aren't supported right now, but Crypton might be planning to license out the Piapro Studio VB software to other companies in the future.

Sounds interesting. Does this means that other Vocaloid studios like Internet and Gynoid use their Vocaloid characters for Crypton's new Piapro Studio like Gackpo, Gumi, Una, flower and the Meikas?

 

[Exemplar]

Sounds interesting. Does this means that other Vocaloid studios like Internet and Gynoid use their Vocaloid characters for Crypton's new Piapro Studio like Gackpo, Gumi, Una, flower and the Meikas?

There has been no word if they would allow development of third party banks for the new engine

 

[xuu]

Sounds interesting. Does this means that other Vocaloid studios like Internet and Gynoid use their Vocaloid characters for Crypton's new Piapro Studio like Gackpo, Gumi, Una, flower and the Meikas?

It would basically be what goes on now with Yamaha and VOCALOID, but it's Crypton and Piapro Studio instead; Crypton licenses companies to develop and release vocals for their software. Of course these companies could have signed agreements with Yamaha where their character cannot be on another synth for x time/the voicer cannot voice synths for x time but we don't know if these comapnies have them specifically. But as Exemplar has said, there has been no word at this time from Crypton as to if they will permit third parties to develop voicebanks for their engine.

 

[Vegetaljuce]

There has been no word if they would allow development of third party banks for the new engine

If they're smart, they'll do this. Otherwise, they'll be splitting an already very niche market... I guess it depends if Crypton thinks that their characters alone are enough to carry the investment they put into developing this new engine. I'm honestly not sure, especially if there's gonna be no backward compatibility with their old VBs, you know? But I'm no business expert.

 

[phantoCrystal]

Hey okay okay okay so WOW a lot is happening.. And I trust Crypton, but a small question.. Has a video of the panel thing been uploaded yet? (Will one be?) cuz I'm wondering if that would have more info that we just don't know yet.