Megpoid English Official Website Up, Preorders Start Jan 15
INTERNET Co., Ltd. has now unveiled a website for the upcoming Megpoid (GUMI) English VOCALOID3 library release as well as a full version of the demo song “You Are the Reason”. A snippet of the song was previously posted as the first demo of the English soundbank, and the full version even includes a portion of GUMI talking. According to the website, online preorders open on January 15 via the VOCALOID STORE, and the library is priced at 10800 JPY (before taxes). The release also comes with the FormantShift VST plugin from the same company (although registered users of software packages from INTERNET also get access to this plugin for free). The Japanese website indicates that people who register their software before the end of March (and have a Japanese address) also are eligible to receive an A4 plastic sheet protector with a Megpoid English illustration on it mailed to them. Lastly, there is now a page detailing English character usage guidelines for INTERNET’s VOCALOID characters.
UPDATE: The package version as well as the starter pack is actually available right now for preorder on the Japanese VOCALOID STORE. Megpoid English is set to be released on February 28.
UPDATE 2: The library-only package version is now available via the English VOCALOID STORE for preorders; it is 135 USD for the software and 32 USD for shipping.
Hhhmmmm Not sure how I feel about English Megpoid her first Demo of “You are the Reason” was pretty choppy and her second demo was muffled to where I couldn’t understand a word she said. I had such high hopes for English Megpoid but it seems she has fallen to the english problem of taking short cuts. Still she has her Japanese voice bank to fall back on so if you buy both her english bank and Japanese bank and use mostly the Japanese bank to do english you could maybe do something with her seeing that it has a more phonemes to use. (On top of that it has the missing that wonderful a and o phoneme needed in english so that is a huge a bonus) Still I’ll admit she has a very small accent which is good because all the engloids have waayyy to big strong of accent. *coughcoughBigAlwithDownSyndromandSonikatheDrunk*coughcough*. Still with English KAITO and Megpoid just around the corner it might be a close market. (Internet Co. and Crypton don’t need to worry about Zero-G since it has already been kinda shown that AVANNA sucks at singing with her recent covers and “originals”.)
In the page about “permissions and Vocaloid characters” Internet Co. tsalks about Gumi,Gakupo,Lily and even CUL, but they didn’t mention anything about Gachpoid (Ryuto), curious. 😮
You’d think that they’d bother to hire someone to write the website’s text a little better. It’s a bit unsettling to think that they put so much effort into making a product that they’re marketing to English customers, and then threw together a website with awful Engrish and though “yeah, that’s fine. Just use that.”
There’re not really marketing her towards English-speaking customers. Sure a few might buy her, but that’s not really the main point. I expect most of their sales will be from Japanese speakers who want to add a bit of English to their songs.
They definitely are marketing her towards English-speaking customers. Gumi English is supposed to be the climax of Vocaloid Trans-Pacific.
Finally they show the lyrics, they help for me. Still not not impressed, but there are certainly other factors, such as the lyrics and I never listen to English songs in general anyways.
So I’ll stick to Japanese Vocaloid songs.
Lool whoops double negative. I wonder if the day will ever come when I am impressed by English Vocaloids.
@FormX
Don’t hold your breath they will never be good. Not until they change up there recording styles and start listening to their consumers. (I’m particularly looking at you Zero-G; stop assuming your products are perfect when in reality they are shit and listen.)
You think that Japanase Vocaloid are perfects?, no!, Japanase native speakers can notice the difference, just like us with english Vocaloids.
Yeah but the English Vocaloid are wwaaaayyyy worse like if Len and Rin are considered the lowest quality in Japan then the English Vocaloids are at the level of Microsoft Sam sucking donkey dick.
that’s due to the languages themselves being different (obviously), to put it into perspective, in order to speak Japanese you have to be able to pronounce around 190 vocal sounds while in order to speak English you have to pronounce over 8000+ vocal sounds. Now those numbers are not set in stone, but they should provide a decent comparison to show why Japanese vocaloids sound so much smoother and easier to understand than engloids. this is also why engloids voice banks are roughly 5 times the size of Japanese voice banks
Blackbird737
Yet the english Vocaloid are still terrible even with all the extra recordings. Why is that? Simple because they are poorly made which is why the english Vocaloids sound so bad while the Japanese Vocaloids sound so much better. Quality > Quantity.
Has it ever been reported that part of the problem with English library sample recording is the voice actor’s exhaustion causing inconsistency between recording session? I’ve been wondering if that is also part of the problem, though each sample could be tweaked, I would assume, by the developers to some sort of baseline.
@mrquadrant4:disqus
Not to my knowledge. Most of the english recorders from what I have researched usually were confused by what to do when making a vocaloid or would get frustrated and stop when recording. Exhaustion really isn’t a factor since it a voice bank takes months to record.
LOL didn’t see this.
DUH Real voice>>>Vocaloid
Well I’m not a native Japanese speaker so that’s why it’s fine with me =P Ignorance is bliss =P
That aside, Japanese Vocaloids are just much more capable of sounding better. It sounds like music. English Vocaloids? Nope.
If you want to dwell in the specifics, I’m sure you can do that with that guy.
Those English character usage guidelines are not something that were just added. They’ve actually been there for a while–at least a few weeks since I’ve first seen it.
My question is, does the Japanese store ship to the United States?