No video has been uploaded to the best of my knowledge, but between Eji and AmanoKei's threads I think we have basically all the information that was presented at the panel.
Other Cryptonloid voicebank updates, collabs, & concert news (crypton_wat Twitter translations)
- Thread starter uncreepy
- Start date
That's the issue right there. Between the six Piapro characters, there isn't a ton of diversity of voice types compared to the entire roster of vocaloids between the v3, v4 & v5 generations.
High pitched female head voices? Miku & Rin have that covered.
Mature sounding adult male? Kaito has that on lock.
Teen male voice? Yup, were talking about Len.
Female adult contemporary voices that can also do 90's club music? Meiko & Luka has that taken care of.
But what about a flexible yet aggressive female chest voice that can handle rock and power pop with little difficulty? CFM has nothing like that in their roster. What about a adult male voice that can handle falsetto? They don't have that either (unless they teach good ol Kaito a new trick or two). How about a cute female voice like Uni, Tianyi or Zunko that doesn't have to squeak like Miku, Rin or from the myriad of v3 female head voices to sound cute? Nope, nada, zilch.
I said back a little bit earlier in this thread that if CFM wanted to make their own engine, they're also going to have to introduce new characters into the Piapro family. Possibly one or two new characters to handle those gaps if they aren't going to allow third party banks on that engine. I doubt CV04 would sound like the often rumored "CV04" (young male voice). If CV04 was to happen, she would likely either be one of the two female voices I mentioned. Female voices tend to be more popular in the singing synth community so I doubt they would introduce a new male into the fold.
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That was a good read. Thanks!
I wonder about that. It's a convincing explanation for their staff reduction. On the other hand, they did do a panic release of Vocaloid 5 to counter IA English on CeVIO, right? That makes me think they still cared, at the time at least, about the Vocaloid business, but maybe their business wasn't doing so well. From that perspective, the staff reduction and stopgap V5 release also make sense as efforts to try to save their Vocaloid line. Though the stuff CFM has said hasn't indicated that they think Yamaha's Vocaloid presence is in trouble, from what I've seen in this thread.
Personally, I'm wondering if the new Piapro engine will be usable as a VSTi, like the current Piapro is, as well as a standalone. If it's going to be intended to rely heavily on the other plugins/tools like Vocal Drive, Cherry Pie, etc., then maybe not...but it seems like those tools could be hosted in the DAW like other plugins (Indeed, for Cherry Pie, that's basically the intention, isn't it?), so maybe so?
Ryo updated his Twitter with a new demo video of Beef Jerky.
Reminder (from post #181) that Beef Jerky is a real-time vocal analysis synthesis system. He added the F0 box and now the Spectral Envelop and Aperiodicity box have a horizontal line with L M M H across them.
In my opinion, the grey sound waves in the "F0" box look like what AIST's VocaListener and Songle detect from the singing. The F0 is the pitch detected, so it seems to be tracking the words sung and marking them.
I tried to look up the lyrics on Google, but couldn't find any results.
VocaListener:
The grey part is what VocaListener detects as singing. The green boxes are where you had to draw notes and tell it what phonemes were being said. (VocaListener was only able to detect pitch and dynamics and where notes started/began, but you had to manually tell it the lyrics.)
Songle:
Songle is like a souped up VocaListener, you tell it the URL of a YouTube song and it tells you were the singing is (grey), where the notes are (pink boxes), and the chords to the song.
* Double-Tracking aka doubling is when a singer sings along with their own pre-recorded singing to create a bigger/stronger sound than what their voice could normally achieve alone.
Reminder (from post #181) that Beef Jerky is a real-time vocal analysis synthesis system. He added the F0 box and now the Spectral Envelop and Aperiodicity box have a horizontal line with L M M H across them.
In my opinion, the grey sound waves in the "F0" box look like what AIST's VocaListener and Songle detect from the singing. The F0 is the pitch detected, so it seems to be tracking the words sung and marking them.
I tried to look up the lyrics on Google, but couldn't find any results.
VocaListener:
The grey part is what VocaListener detects as singing. The green boxes are where you had to draw notes and tell it what phonemes were being said. (VocaListener was only able to detect pitch and dynamics and where notes started/began, but you had to manually tell it the lyrics.)
Songle:
Songle is like a souped up VocaListener, you tell it the URL of a YouTube song and it tells you were the singing is (grey), where the notes are (pink boxes), and the chords to the song.
*JUCE is open-source and used for people who want to develop plug-ins (such as VSTs). It's a C++ library that helps you build applications and also design what their interface looks like.
Edit: Haha, I didn't notice the little cow head icon next to the Y in "Beef Jerky".
Did they actually confirm that the new standalone Piapro will not use any Vocaloid API (I might have missed that) or was it only confirmed that it won't use Vocaloid 5 specifically? I could actually see Yamaha being willing to let Crypton (and only Crypton) continue to use an older or modified version in order to maintain their symbiotic relationship while still pushing V5 on everyone else.
They haven't clarified what Piapro Standalone is/isn't this entire time (the whole 2ish year span I've been translating Wat tweets). Wat only referred to them as "Appends".
So, we have no clue how close to Vocaloid the new Piapro/VST effectors (such as Cherry Pie) actually are and if any version of Vocaloid is compatible with the new Piapro or not.
All we have been given officially is the one Cherry Pie/Vocal Drive demo, some collab songs with producers who got to use Cherry Pie, and photos of diagrams from Crypton showing off Cherry Pie at technology events. We have no clue if older versions of Cryptonloids work with the new Piapro or if you will need to purchase new versions. We do know that they have tweaked their old voices (Miku/Rin/Len/Luka V4 and Kaito/Meiko V3 to be clearer and have shorter phonemes), so we can only make assumptions based on the evidence so far.
It looks like Crypton/Yamaha are holding out and forcing us to wait til the end of the year for the blog post that is supposed to explain what's going on.
So, we have no clue how close to Vocaloid the new Piapro/VST effectors (such as Cherry Pie) actually are and if any version of Vocaloid is compatible with the new Piapro or not.
All we have been given officially is the one Cherry Pie/Vocal Drive demo, some collab songs with producers who got to use Cherry Pie, and photos of diagrams from Crypton showing off Cherry Pie at technology events. We have no clue if older versions of Cryptonloids work with the new Piapro or if you will need to purchase new versions. We do know that they have tweaked their old voices (Miku/Rin/Len/Luka V4 and Kaito/Meiko V3 to be clearer and have shorter phonemes), so we can only make assumptions based on the evidence so far.
It looks like Crypton/Yamaha are holding out and forcing us to wait til the end of the year for the blog post that is supposed to explain what's going on.
All true.
Just to speculate, I feel like it's a bit mean of them to have a sale on Cryptonloids (Which they even extended!) if the new Piapro won't support them, though. Granted that they've said there will be a discount for owners of their older VBs, but still, that would be basically (discounted) money down the drain once the new engine comes out. It seems like that would make the users mad, and I have a hard time thinking that that hasn't occurred to them/that they're willing to do that for the sake of a short-term score of a few bucks. It makes me think that the new engine will have some backwards compatibility. Though, based on what they've said about shortened phonemes, etc., you almost think there have to be new VBs to go along with the new engine. That plus the break from Vocaloid (and what you'd assume would be the discontinuation of use of the Vocaloid API), and I'm not sure how they would do that...
...unless that's a good reason why CFM and Yamaha are staying on good terms.
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It's especially interesting to me because the one instance of Vocal Drive being demonstrated that I'M familiar with is the "Seraphim on the Ring" video which features the world "Vocaloid" in the music video very prominently, which seems like something Crypton wouldn't want if they're trying to move away from the Vocaloid brand.
Okay, I ask Noboru Murakami, the President of Internet Co., Ltd, a question via Twitter about a possibility of moving their Vocaloid voicebanks to Crypton's new Piapro Studio, this is what he told me:
Anyway, an another Twitter user by the name of Vegetaljuce ask Noboru about either moving to the different engine like Crypton has or they're not going to develop any more voicebanks. Again, this is what he told them:
Anyway, an another Twitter user by the name of Vegetaljuce ask Noboru about either moving to the different engine like Crypton has or they're not going to develop any more voicebanks. Again, this is what he told them:
Vocal Drive stuff:
On Mitchie-M's blog about the song ( 新曲『リングの熾天使』の制作で使用した機材を紹介 ), he said for Kaito's screaming, he used VocalDrive and HS Booster (which stretched out the voice).
Internet Co.'s reply:
Thank you @Wario94 and @Vegetaljuce for asking Internet Co. about that. I'm glad/surprised he answered openly about it. I guess we can consider this as further evidence that Piapro won't be "backwards compatible" with old Vocaloids.
Not that I think Crypton can't/won't "resurrect" an old Vocaloid, they might ask a specific company or bring back one of their old canceled 'loids. I think it's highly likely that Crypton will just keep creating new vocals after the updated Cryptonloids are released. Who knows if it would be a completely new character or something like a Cryptonloid version of a popular VTuber?
I think that is the only demo (other than the one by Crypton) of Vocal Drive being used. There are a lot more examples of Cherry Pie (especially last year). I watched the music video several times and I didn't even notice "Vocaloid" anywhere. ^^; Personally, I don't think the concept for Vocal Drive is very new, just look in my signature at the link to "how to make Vocaloids do a metal scream/growl", Vocal Drive is basically just a preset for distortion which people have figured out several methods of doing in the past (whether through VSTs or drawing Vocaloid parameters in a specific way). In this post #157 ( Cryptonloid voicebank updates, collabs, & concert news (crypton_wat Twitter translations) ), I noticed that in Crypton's demo, Cherry Pie has a part where it sounds like Vocal Drive (when Cherry Pie had the Spectral Envelope dials changed). So I basically think Vocal Drive is cruise control for a several quick screams you can also achieve through Cherry Pie's settings.
On Mitchie-M's blog about the song ( 新曲『リングの熾天使』の制作で使用した機材を紹介 ), he said for Kaito's screaming, he used VocalDrive and HS Booster (which stretched out the voice).
Internet Co.'s reply:
Thank you @Wario94 and @Vegetaljuce for asking Internet Co. about that. I'm glad/surprised he answered openly about it. I guess we can consider this as further evidence that Piapro won't be "backwards compatible" with old Vocaloids.
Not that I think Crypton can't/won't "resurrect" an old Vocaloid, they might ask a specific company or bring back one of their old canceled 'loids. I think it's highly likely that Crypton will just keep creating new vocals after the updated Cryptonloids are released. Who knows if it would be a completely new character or something like a Cryptonloid version of a popular VTuber?
Welp, MikuFan has a article now: Hatsune Miku's Move From Vocaloid, What We Know And What This Means For Fans & Producers
I watched the Beef Jerky video again and thought I'd point out a few more things. (I'm clearly bored, don't ask. I think if I can figure out what each section of the upcoming Piapro does, then we cal all be masters at tuning and become the next Mitchie-Ms. 
)
Note: I used these sites ( 3.3 Spectral Envelopes and https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167639316300413 ) for research.
F0: (0:17 - 0:26) It's pitch. Beefy Jerky detects the pitch it thinks you're singing at. If you move the dial, it makes the pitch higher or lower by moving the whole sound up/down as a group. (When he turns the dial, you can see a dark grey version of the white group of "notes" (assuming it's like VocaListener/Songle).) When you move the pitch up, it sounds like Mickey Mouse because moving the octaves up shrinks the vocal tract's length. Moving up/down is related to transposing.
Spectral envelope: (0:29 0:30) - The spectral envelope wraps around the peaks of a sound wave. In singing, the spectral envelope is independent of pitch. When you affect pitch (the F0), the spectral envelope moves along with it (up/down). When you move the pitch up and it sounds like Mickey because of the vocal tract being shrunk, you use the spectral envelope to fix it. The problem of the Mickey voice is from when you pitch shift up, it makes the amplitude of the sound waves get wonked up and have to rely on the spectral envelope to tell it where to belong. You have to adjust the spectral envelope to fit properly around the sound wave which was moved up and "jostled" so that the locations of the formants ( Formant - Wikipedia there's a chart on here) and spectral envelope are placed to sound natural.
Aperiodicity: (0:26 - 0:28) In vocoders (VSTs that coat the voice in things like autotune or a robot voice, for example), speech analysis is made of the fundamental frequency (F0), spectral envelope estimators, and an aperiodic parameter to improve the sound quality of synthesized speech. Aperiodicity is a parameter which must be used with the F0 and spectral envelope to improve sound quality. Aperiodicity means it doesn't have regular/periodic intervals (I guess that you could use periodicity in vocal synthesis, but it's cruddy because it depends on a position in time and wonks up the estimated speech-- it's not good to use because the target spectral envelope is never static). Aperiodicity also means that an instrument is being damped so it doesn't oscillate.
I might try to research how periodic and aperiodic waves relate to vocal synthesis (the remaining bottom 2 boxes), but I am running out of time to write and my brain hurts.
)Note: I used these sites ( 3.3 Spectral Envelopes and https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167639316300413 ) for research.
F0: (0:17 - 0:26) It's pitch. Beefy Jerky detects the pitch it thinks you're singing at. If you move the dial, it makes the pitch higher or lower by moving the whole sound up/down as a group. (When he turns the dial, you can see a dark grey version of the white group of "notes" (assuming it's like VocaListener/Songle).) When you move the pitch up, it sounds like Mickey Mouse because moving the octaves up shrinks the vocal tract's length. Moving up/down is related to transposing.
Spectral envelope: (0:29 0:30) - The spectral envelope wraps around the peaks of a sound wave. In singing, the spectral envelope is independent of pitch. When you affect pitch (the F0), the spectral envelope moves along with it (up/down). When you move the pitch up and it sounds like Mickey because of the vocal tract being shrunk, you use the spectral envelope to fix it. The problem of the Mickey voice is from when you pitch shift up, it makes the amplitude of the sound waves get wonked up and have to rely on the spectral envelope to tell it where to belong. You have to adjust the spectral envelope to fit properly around the sound wave which was moved up and "jostled" so that the locations of the formants ( Formant - Wikipedia there's a chart on here) and spectral envelope are placed to sound natural.
Aperiodicity: (0:26 - 0:28) In vocoders (VSTs that coat the voice in things like autotune or a robot voice, for example), speech analysis is made of the fundamental frequency (F0), spectral envelope estimators, and an aperiodic parameter to improve the sound quality of synthesized speech. Aperiodicity is a parameter which must be used with the F0 and spectral envelope to improve sound quality. Aperiodicity means it doesn't have regular/periodic intervals (I guess that you could use periodicity in vocal synthesis, but it's cruddy because it depends on a position in time and wonks up the estimated speech-- it's not good to use because the target spectral envelope is never static). Aperiodicity also means that an instrument is being damped so it doesn't oscillate.
I might try to research how periodic and aperiodic waves relate to vocal synthesis (the remaining bottom 2 boxes), but I am running out of time to write and my brain hurts.
There are several screens and banners around the arena describing the wrestling federation as "Vocaloid Wrestling". Just seems like a weird thing for Crypton to approve if they really are ditching Vocaloid.
I wouldn't really read too much into it. Probably just needed something to fill the space and that was the first thing that came to mind - also doubt that Crypton really care *that* much when they were using VOCALOID banks for this anyway.
I could be overlooking something, but I'm not sure I agree that these posts are evidence of the new Piapro not being backwards compatible. The first post makes it sound like he doesn't know what the current Piapro can do, but would welcome being on the new Piapro if it supports older synths. The second post just says Internet doesn't plan to change engines.
So basically, Internet doesn't know what the new Piapro will be capable of. They'll be happy to be on the platform if it supports their synths, but they don't currently plan on doing extra work to get on the new platform if that platform doesn't support them.
Not that I currently feel the new Piapro will be backwards compatible. Right now, I kind of feel 70-30 against that possibility.
I would love if the new Piapro was backward compatible. But I feel as the main translator for this Wat thread that I have to base my (public) opinion on here as being "Wat didn't say X, so X isn't happening". Don't take me reminding everyone with "but Wat said X" as 100% disagreeing (right now I feel like the chances of Piapro being backwards compatible is more like 80% "not happening" and 20% "hopefully it will happen").
Because I'm the main translator on this thread, I do not want my tinfoil hat guesses being confused with actual information that has quotes/proof behind it rather than just speculation. Because the thread is SO long and spans multiple years, and people check up on the thread at different points in time and might not have read it all, I feel like my "but Wat said X" are reminders for people who are just randomly checking in. I really don't want to get peoples' hopes up regarding a Piapro feature by agreeing something is true when there is no definite fact/quote to base it on.
So anyway, I really enjoy reading everyone's theories. But don't try too hard to convince me to agree that a theory is true, because I probably won't due to wanting to protect official translated quotes/information.
That being said, I guess what I was thinking when Internet Co. said they would be happy if the new Piapro was backward compatible, I thought that if Crypton wanted to make sure other companies' Vocaloids worked, wouldn't you think they would ask to do some tests with their files? Unless Yamaha had that part covered. I guess I also thought that Gumi is one of the most popular female Vocaloids, so if they were to ask any company to join the new Piapro, you'd think Internet Co. would be the first to know about it (other than AHS).
Because I'm the main translator on this thread, I do not want my tinfoil hat guesses being confused with actual information that has quotes/proof behind it rather than just speculation. Because the thread is SO long and spans multiple years, and people check up on the thread at different points in time and might not have read it all, I feel like my "but Wat said X" are reminders for people who are just randomly checking in. I really don't want to get peoples' hopes up regarding a Piapro feature by agreeing something is true when there is no definite fact/quote to base it on.
So anyway, I really enjoy reading everyone's theories. But don't try too hard to convince me to agree that a theory is true, because I probably won't due to wanting to protect official translated quotes/information.
That being said, I guess what I was thinking when Internet Co. said they would be happy if the new Piapro was backward compatible, I thought that if Crypton wanted to make sure other companies' Vocaloids worked, wouldn't you think they would ask to do some tests with their files? Unless Yamaha had that part covered. I guess I also thought that Gumi is one of the most popular female Vocaloids, so if they were to ask any company to join the new Piapro, you'd think Internet Co. would be the first to know about it (other than AHS).
I just hope that they would keep Piapro V4 and have the newer one be a separate Editor. Since they did their surprising sale that mostly everyone that is new has the V3s and V4s of their banks. We can expect a discount for sure, but what of the ones that own other Vocaloids but don't own the V4 or V5 editor? Since the new might not work on the older voicebanks or another older Vocaloids.... 
My fear for my babies
Unless.... they have it where you sort of get the new version, but won't have access to the new features similar to Piapro Studio 3 and 4 ( XSY, GROWL, Pitch Rendering, etc.)
For adding in new Vocaloids to Piapro Studio.... there was that time that CFM wanted to accept Ruby but on their terms and all that (Ruby's team decline however), so.... if any new companies wants to join the "Vocaloid" scene, perhaps they could get a shot with them? Zero-G and CFM have a relationship too so another possibility. Like the main six could still be the main six, but the others are just from other companies and not really part of the Crypton family...
Rambling too much and struggling on thinking more....must stop now....
Unless.... they have it where you sort of get the new version, but won't have access to the new features similar to Piapro Studio 3 and 4 ( XSY, GROWL, Pitch Rendering, etc.)
For adding in new Vocaloids to Piapro Studio.... there was that time that CFM wanted to accept Ruby but on their terms and all that (Ruby's team decline however), so.... if any new companies wants to join the "Vocaloid" scene, perhaps they could get a shot with them? Zero-G and CFM have a relationship too so another possibility. Like the main six could still be the main six, but the others are just from other companies and not really part of the Crypton family...
Rambling too much and struggling on thinking more....must stop now....
Since the new Piapro Studio has Cherry Pie for many VTubers, I had an idea: here's my series in which both Rin and Len reviewing stuff like movies, TV show, and even FanFiction!
So, what do you think?
So, what do you think?
@uncreepy: That's a good stance to take. Preventing the spread of misinformation is important!
I guess it's also worth mentioning that Wat's talk at Mirai almost certainly wasn't their last product announcement about this. There'll have to be something more formal/widespread (like the blog post he mentioned during his talk, for one) that goes into final detail about the capabilities of the new platform/editor. Wat's talk was probably mainly to get More fans excited about the new stuff, so maybe he didn't bother to talk about supporting new things. Or maybe any such support hasn't been finalized yet. Or they could decide to hold off on it and make it an update after their new platform/editor (which I'd assume is their main focus) launches.
Makes sense. I'd think it wouldn't be hard to check if a Vocaloid worked in the new editor--if nothing else, couldn't they test with their own Vocaloid DBs, unless the Vocaloid platform's terms from Yamaha prevent it somehow? I guess those terms would be the main issue--now that their VBs are on another platform, will they continue to maintain whatever relationship is needed with Yamaha to license the Vocaloid API for the benefit of old CFM Vocaloids or the Vocaloids of other companies? Only time will tell on that one.
I guess it's also worth mentioning that Wat's talk at Mirai almost certainly wasn't their last product announcement about this. There'll have to be something more formal/widespread (like the blog post he mentioned during his talk, for one) that goes into final detail about the capabilities of the new platform/editor. Wat's talk was probably mainly to get More fans excited about the new stuff, so maybe he didn't bother to talk about supporting new things. Or maybe any such support hasn't been finalized yet. Or they could decide to hold off on it and make it an update after their new platform/editor (which I'd assume is their main focus) launches.
AFAIK, the new editor is described as a standalone, so I'd assume that the existing plug-in Piapro should continue working. At least it seems reasonable to think that.I just hope that they would keep Piapro V4 and have the newer one be a separate Editor. Since they did their surprising sale that mostly everyone that is new has the V3s and V4s of their banks. We can expect a discount for sure, but what of the ones that own other Vocaloids but don't own the V4 or V5 editor? Since the new might not work on the older voicebanks or another older Vocaloids....My fearfor my babies
Unless.... they have it where you sort of get the new version, but won't have access to the new features similar to Piapro Studio 3 and 4 ( XSY, GROWL, Pitch Rendering, etc.)