Thread by @Lystrialle

All right, here's a long incoming thread from your girl here about what "Miku no longer being a Vocaloid" means for the benefit of those not as deeply in the circuit, and why that's actually not as terrifying or world-ending as it sounds (bear with me)

So as much as "Hatsune Miku" has been considered synonymous with "Vocaloid" for a long time now, that wasn't actually the case from a technical standpoint. Miku and co. are licensed VBs from Crypton that worked off the Vocaloid engine from Yamaha.

This is basically akin to how a lot of virtual instruments run on the Kontakt sampler, or how games run on different consoles. These analogies are gonna get real important in a bit, so hang tight.

Unfortunately, Crypton having to be dependent on Yamaha's engine for their --

-- products meant they were subject to a lot of very strict limitations Yamaha was imposing on any company licensing from them. Most infamously, Yamaha doesn't actually allow VB devs to roll out patches for any VBs they release -- "updates" have to be separate products.

At one point in 2008 Crypton infamously had to get around their dissatisfaction with the newly released Rin and Len by literally mailing a copy of a disc with a new version of the DBs (act2), legally registered as a "new product" offered for free to those with the old version

This means that Crypton (and all other companies) were basically very limited in how they could push out updates, when they could do so, and in what way they could configure their DBs.

Most significantly, ever since V3, the Vocaloid editor now has its own price tag on it.

It's been getting more and more difficult to get in as a beginner, and that's been a severe point of concern for the community as of late. V5 has a price tag in the literal hundreds and has hefty CPU requirements, and is out of reach for a lot of beginners...

...and so that means if Crypton wanted to update any of their DBs, they would be obligated to release it as a V5 release, which would mean *removing* compatibility with older versions and basically trapping it to be linked to the most expensive editor iteration to date.

Here's a bit of a history diversion: when Crypton's first V3 came out (KAITO V3, February 2013), it came bundled with a little thing called "Piapro Studio", which at the time was basically just a reskinned Vocaloid engine. But it was notable because it meant prospective new --

-- buyers of KAITO V3 (and future Crypton relases) weren't technically bound to buying Yamaha's editor for the product to be usable.

More notably, Crypton thereafter stopped using the word "Vocaloid" to describe Miku and co., instead terming them "Piapro Characters".

For those of you DIVA players: have you ever noticed how they very much have always been dodging the word "Vocaloid" in places it wasn't already grandfathered in?

Yeah, this has probably been incoming for a very long time ago.

Two years ago, in April 2017, Twindrill (the entity managing UTAU Kasane Teto) sent some Teto samples to Crypton just to hear how it sounded in Vocaloid. When wat (an engineer at Crypton) played around with it, he promptly complained that Teto lost all of her identity in the --

-- Vocaloid editor, and shortly after suddenly had a huge burst of inspiration for development of technology that might significantly enhance all their vocal banks.
Yesterday, at the same press conference that announced all this, he showed off what seems to be the result of this.

The press conference described technology that would be uniformly applied to all six of their vocals and enhance their expressive capabilities and clarity, and a bunch of vocal processing helper tools...all of which would be impossible to implement in Yamaha's Vocaloid.

The point eventually made was that the reason for the split was simply that Crypton's goals and more ambitious plans for their products simply wouldn't be doable within the constraints of Vocaloid and V5. They plan to continue working with Yamaha and the community, of course.

In effect the analogy is best described as a Kontakt instrument deciding to take itself off Kontakt and run off its own sampler, or Monster Hunter not being on Sony consoles anymore. The substance will continue to exist, even if the platform is different.

So what does this mean for all of us?

For the users, this is a Very Big Deal, because the assumption that anything would be obligated to Yamaha is now broken and Crypton is now capable of whipping out a lot of things they never were able to before.

It'll probably be cheaper, which is important for beginners, and the user will have more options to choose from. People who want to use Miku, or Rin or Len, or whoever will still be able to get them, and they'll still be in active development. People who want to use the others --

-- in the Vocaloid editor will still be able to (in fact, I still don't have that much issue with personally using V5). Moreover, the fact Miku is probably the only thing with more name value than the word Vocaloid means that there's now precedent for competition and for other --

-- companies to consider ways going forward that don't necessarily have to involve Yamaha's monopoly in it.

For the listeners, what'll change is...probably not that much, to be honest.

Of course a new engine probably means it'll sound a bit different, and hopefully better. And Crypton fans at least will have to get used to eschewing expectations of updates coming around only --

-- with new iterations, new designs coming out at X time, or whatever. But it's unlikely this change will have a huge impact on how producers do things, and so, Miku will still be Miku, the others will still be the others.

And finally, what this means for the community: well, currently we're having a crisis on what to call ourselves after having called ourselves the "Vocaloid" community for so long 😅

But while this is certainly the most drastic incident on face value, there have already been --

-- different engines in this community for years now. I started off as an UTAU user. CeVIO is getting bigger, and 1st PLACE is dabbling in it. SynthV just came out and is up and coming. GYARI is making headlines with Voiceroid songs. We're still one community.

Because yeah, in the end...people are still probably going to do what they're gonna do. Miku is still Miku. Vocaloid is still Vocaloid. People are still gonna create, the end result will be similar, it's just the methodology that's changing.

In fact, most of the fellow users I know are very excited about this because it opens up a ton of possibilities. I personally am very, *very* interested in how this is gonna go (especially if I end up saving money in the end!).

Moreover, the new technologies showed off at the press conference were very exciting, and Crypton's also demoing a new music search service that inherits Piapro and KarenT's philosophy of being open towards competitor software. They're *very* aware that the community operates --

-- best when they're able to mix and match and choose what products suit them best, and that trying to stop that would be shooting themselves in the foot. So while I do of course still have some degree of uncertainty, I'm sure we're gonna be fine.

So, yes! It sounds crazy and it sounds like a blow to our sentimental value of the reality we know being turned on our heads! But as someone who's been here for near exactly ten years, I honestly welcome this development as something that could take our community further.

So I hope that clears it up for anyone potentially confused. Thank you for bearing with this 😊