I'm gonna be honest, sometimes I feel insecure about using old voicebanks because everyone seems to be moving on to the fancy cutting-edge AI technology and I'm still using concatenative voicebanks from the V3-V4 era.
Then again, my idealistic 12-year-old self specifically wanted to be a Vocaloid producer, and the things I experimented with before purchasing Miku, such as UTAU, Sharpkey/Deepvocal, and the free versions of SynthV (R1 evaluation and R2 Basic), and even RenoidPlayer and Sinsy before I even had access to anything more than a Chromebook (I had a PC I could use since before Web SynthV came out), were just to get me ready. Part of me just wants to honor my tween-age wishes, and I'm also super used to Piapro Studio by now.
But at the same time, in both the vocalsynth fandom and music-production communities, people are largely leaving the old stuff behind in favor of AI-powered stuff, especially SynthV at least in the West. Many of my favorite vocalists are getting updates- and for those who likely aren't, fans are screaming for them to, acting like their companies are criminals for not giving them such- and some new vocals are super tempting too, especially if I could potentially use them well in my favorite genres. But I can't afford it right now, and even when I'm set up with a job I can't just go spending all over the place no matter how much people say "you should totally get X Y and Z!"
Then again, my idealistic 12-year-old self specifically wanted to be a Vocaloid producer, and the things I experimented with before purchasing Miku, such as UTAU, Sharpkey/Deepvocal, and the free versions of SynthV (R1 evaluation and R2 Basic), and even RenoidPlayer and Sinsy before I even had access to anything more than a Chromebook (I had a PC I could use since before Web SynthV came out), were just to get me ready. Part of me just wants to honor my tween-age wishes, and I'm also super used to Piapro Studio by now.
But at the same time, in both the vocalsynth fandom and music-production communities, people are largely leaving the old stuff behind in favor of AI-powered stuff, especially SynthV at least in the West. Many of my favorite vocalists are getting updates- and for those who likely aren't, fans are screaming for them to, acting like their companies are criminals for not giving them such- and some new vocals are super tempting too, especially if I could potentially use them well in my favorite genres. But I can't afford it right now, and even when I'm set up with a job I can't just go spending all over the place no matter how much people say "you should totally get X Y and Z!"
honestly, it's baffling how everyone's jumped on the 'Yamaha bad' train but continue to give crypton a pass when they're prob even worse (like pointing out how small their software development team actually is, when the guys who made THE MOST POPULAR VOCALS IN THE WORLD could def afford an actual team)