Other Software Omnivocal by... Yamaha?

[BANKARA_TEEvie]

In a shocking turn of events, Yamaha decides to both reinvent the wheel and keep it exactly the same, as it rereleases what feels essentially like Vocaloid 6 (or even vxb, which got a release anyway) again, but in an even more "professional vst" package.


It has pretty much the same features, and functions in the same real-time way as VXB - and I honestly don't know what this means for Vocaloid? Perhaps just an attempt to have a more professional business-y rebrand, or something like voisona, but it appears the big gimmick is mainly that it's built directly into Cubase. We killed Vocaloid for Cubase for this.

It supports English and Japanese (no Chinese!), and has two voicebanks at the moment - give it up for Male and Female, everybody! I'm serious

 

[sunnyp4rk]

I imagine Yamaha probably wanted a version of VXB that doesn't require buying V6, and also appeal to non-Vocaloid fans. Still an odd thing they decided to randomly drop lol

 

[Stoo-S]

Of course there's nothing pointing in that direction other than my gut, and I don't mean to be that guy but... those portraits look like something a generic Generative AI would make...

Also that logo is not really readable, like, I get what they were going for with the "M" and "N" looking like sound waves but it just ends up reading like "iVocal" to me.

Interesting that they are using Arpabet for the phonemes, tho. Don't know what that means, just something I noticed.

 

[parallax_fifths]

those portraits look like something a generic Generative AI would make...

They certainly do. The image resolution is low, but not low enough to completely hide the waxy appearance that is common for generated images. Although I wouldn't be surprised if some manual touch up took place.

 

[WyndReed]

Man, those images do not fit the vocals at all. Anyone else notice how it pronounced air as AR as well as some other words? That logo is terrible too, it looks like "oivocal" instead of omnivocal.

 

[mary34]

On the one hand I think those are just some random stock images they pulled from some site, on the other hands a lot of stock image sites are flooded by midjourney slop so this does not clear up the ai thing.

I get the method to the madness behind this products existence, but man I wish they just dropped a standalone release of VxB instead

 

[lIlI]

Haha this is random. But also somewhat inevitable.

Vocaloid has always been in a state of tension between its professional and otaku audiences. V1 was innocently targeted at demo vocals for studio musicians, only to pivot with great fanfare into an anime-idol push with V3, following Miku's surprise break-out as an online sensation on NicoNicoDouga. After catastrophic financial failure taught Yamaha you can't reliably replicate her success, Vocaloid regained some commercial stability with the conservatively professional V5 release ...before ACE and SynthV ate their session singer nachos with smoother workflows and more convincing realism.

Since then, Vocaloid seems to have shuffled back into the fandom market with a roster of VTuber collaborations and nostalgic ports of old favourites.

After all this flip-flopping, it looks like they've given up on exorcising anime from their brand image, and opted to simply separate into two skews pushing the same concept of virtual singers for two different demographics. A Coke Zero/Diet Coke situation, except here, Coke Zero has a picture of Hatsune Miku on it.

 

[Blue Of Mind]

I saw this and I immediately thought Yamaha were trying to a pull a CeVIO/VoiSona with Vocaloid. The voices are fine, but those "avatars" are so lame and unfitting! I'd be down for a revival of the stock image era of Vocaloid (nowadays, we either get anime avatars, silhouettes or Dreamtonics's letters), but using AI slop imagery* is lazy.

*I can tell the avatars are AI because their hair is way too shiny and their skin too waxy to look naturally human. It's something I've had to learn from Pinterest, since that site is unusuable these days because of all the AI pictures.

 

[Bookworm2]

I. Um. Hm. Why, Yamaha? Is VXB not good enough for you? Also, Male and Female. People, we have reached the peak of creativity. But seriously, what possessed them to make this? I guess a VST version is fine, but is there any need to make it a different thing from V6? Also, as Blue Of Mind said, the avatars are 100% AI generated. Maybe these are just placeholder images? I guess I'll wait see what happens with this, but it doesn't look good to me.

 

[Grzesiek11]

What was the point of VXB anyways? I am not a producer, but doesn't "mainline" Vocaloid have VST support too?

I guess I get the "branding for pros" argument for this, but it feels really weird anyways.

If they used AI for the characters, that's kinda crazy. They are literally generic white guy and generic white girl, you can find pebibytes of stock footage like this.

 

[sunnyp4rk]

VXB was meant to be an experimental thing, and I guess this is Yamaha taking that free* VST and turning it into a commercial product for Super Professional Musicians.

*free is subjective because you still have to have V6 to use it.

Either way. Still a super pointless product to exist. It looks to me like Yamaha felt embarrassed by the anime styled avatars and wanted something to appeal to the normies...or something idk

 

[carmenxsleepy]

The vocals sound so uncanny to me?? Like not in the good "we've gotten so realistic that it sounds cool and creepy" way in the "these seem like overly polished humans" way... And it kinda reminds me of ACE the way they sound tbh... I get why they would try to make a new product after how niche VOCALOID has gotten but like... this is the wrong direction imo.

 

[MagicalMiku]

It really seems like a side project, made for all those professional users that use Cubase and are not interested in Vocaloid "because anime". Ok, I get it.
And I understand that the team behind it might have a very limited budget.
What I don't get is.. the avatar images. Even with a limited budget, they could hire any pixiv artist to draw some neutral art or silhouette for male and female. Or actually pay real models for some pictures and rights to use those pictures in the software. In Tokyo there are various talent agencies that offer those services, with western models too (if they really wanted to, like the pictures suggest).
But no, of course they chose the ai tool image because "ai" and "free". It was better if they offered no images at all, or a simple avatar creation.
I'm not interested in ai at all, but I was curious "how long does it take to make a picture like that"?
It took me about 30 seconds, from searching "image generator no login", found this url:
edited
type "cute girl short hair wearing white tshirt, white background", choose some styles (I chose 2 anime styles, 1 comic, 1 photo 90's), and.. voila'!
I don't know what to say
edit (oi-chan, you were too good)

(you can clearly see how the hairstyle is so similar to those images)
anime styles:
--
comic style:
--

Yamaha,
don't use ai tools. Thank you.

 

[Palamon]

Ooh... Yikes this is a turnoff. No thanks.

 

[Bookworm2]

Well, shit. That's not good. At this point I'm just hoping that this is placeholder art, and not final. If it's final, then OH BOY will the fans have issues. Hell, using AI art might also turn off professional music producers, so they're just shooting themselves in the foot. Also, I just noticed in the "official" art, the girl's cheeks look super unnatural. If you're gonna do AI art, make it at least somewhat convincing.

 

[BANKARA_TEEvie]

i guess what has me the most flummoxed is the fact that they talk about this new generation of vsynth technology, when in reality we're at a point where V6 is going to be *LAST GEN* soon (for a program that many believe is already lagging behind its competitors).

when they said they were experimenting with vxb, i did expect it to be for the future betterment of vocaloid and that they were trying out all kinds of new synthesis tech and whatever - i did NOT expect their plan to be 'well this is pretty good already, so what if we repackaged it as its... own thing?'
the idea of using it to make something more marketable to western producers when most of them would be looking for SV-quality vocals is crazy!! i love v6, but it's very much "a face sound quality only a mother legacy fan could love".

now like, whenever i critique v6, i tend to get a comment talking about how it's now yamaha's intention for it to be more synthetic than the other engine options - and for our community who misses our concatenative roots and enjoys making music with unique, unnatural styles, that's great! the average producer, though, would likely just want completely "human" vocals out of the box that *they* can then style... i can't see them picking omnivocal over sv, essentially.

i guess what's even weirder is that, in this time where a lot of producers are interested in AI vocal synthesis, a lot of people have turned *back* to vocaloid (more producers know about vocaloid than you'd think!) because of it having some of that AI Music marketing in the same way engines like SV or ACE have been - maybe a bit less favorable for its lesser quality, but the name 'vocaloid' itself would have had more reach regardless of they're scared of its associations with anime girls or whatever.

maybe the programs will diverge more - maybe this'll get updates where it'll end up sounding super realistic whereas V6 will stay as more of a 'character vocal'-type engine... but even then, it does NOT make me feel very confident in the future of vocaloid when they're being kinda wishy-washy with its main userbase - aka, people in the vsynth community.

tl;dr i know it's very "obvious" as to what yamaha's intentions are with this little plugin, but i still can't shake the feeling that it's just absolutely bonkers in every single way, just makes no sense.

 

[Alphonse]

I fully believed this was called oivocal until I saw this thread.

It seems to just be vx_beta but for normies.

 

[mary34]

Honestly that soundwave in the middle of the logo just looks like a botched kaomoji to me
Check out our new vocalsynth product, >⩊<vocal

 

[parallax_fifths]

Oi Vocal, for all your punk rock needs.

Oi - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

!

fake edit: Why does the forum software repeat the exclamation mark from the Wikipedia URL and display it below the link?

 

[MagicalMiku]

for the url, sometimes the auto-preview might change some things, so for some URLs, is better to edit the post and set the url tag preview to "false"

aaaaand..
I heard someone is asking for non-binary! before Yamaha will show another ai image, here is a "less than 30 seconds effort" image! (this thread is becoming fun, I admit)
what I asked:

non binary emo punk girl cute, white tshirt yamaha printed logo, white background

here's non binary oi-chan (the extra fingers are for playing guitar better, don't judge)!

and for the normies as well:

[Gen-AI images removed by Admin]
"happy to have brought some smiles"