- Joined
- Jul 31, 2020
- Highlight
- #1
What's Vocaloid, I hear you ask, all the way from the thread title?
Vocaloid (ボーカロイド, Bōkaroido) is a singing voice synthesizer software product. The software enables users to synthesize "singing" by typing in lyrics and melody. It uses synthesizing technology with specially recorded vocals of voice actors or singers.
Now, the genre of songs made with the program might be associated with cute animu vocal synths nowadays, but it's no doubt that it made such a huge boom in the late 2000s, namely with the arrival of the central character that is formerly the face of the software, Hatsune Miku.
Miku NT, the latest reiteration of Miku after her parent company decided to split off from VOCALOID as a software.
Now, you may be wondering why this software is deserving of a thread. Simply put, anime girl avatar = retardation.
A bit of a history lesson for everyone, Vocaloid was initially released in 2004. Hatsune Miku V1 was released in 2007. Up until that point, few people knew about the software and you're lucky to even find something from that era still up on YouTube or NicoNicoDouga. But then Miku came along and became the catalyst for launching the dinky little synth software into stardom in the music scene - and a fandom into lolcowdom.
In comes the early 2010s, 4chan is still a good place, and most fandoms are kicking off due to widespread of the internet. deco*27, MitchieM and wowaka are the music producers of the most viewed Vocaloid songs ever made, and for good reason.
With young children and even adults just then getting into the music for the pretty anime girls, some wanted their very own Mikus! And so every young teenager made their own equivalent of Miku, either by modifying the voicebanks to make new ones - "derivatives", or to put it in Kiwifarms terms, do nut steel recolors of official voicebanks - or used their very own voices to create a voicebank for poorman's VOCALOID software, UTAU.
Some of the most popular UTAUs.
Now, you may be wondering why this fandom of singing robots needs a thread.
Well, back then in simpler times, all of this was harmless fun. You would see users of the now-defunct VocaloidOtaku forums (more on that in a bit) arguing over whether the mirror Vocaloids Len and Rin were siblings or lovers. You would see genderbends of popular Vocaloids, complete with derivative voicebanks and "official box art" designs.
This continued for a long, long time, even today, with the fandom thriving on constant new songs. Literal hundreds of thousands of Vocaloid songs and song covers were uploaded monthly on NND, and the more successful songs made it over to YouTube with millions of views currently, either by the help of prominent translators and fan-subbers, or the music producers themselves in recent years.
In current day social media however, it is a mess to say the least.
*Take everything here with a grain of salt, the majority of the following milk is beyond expired and there are no screenshots for some, but there are many recountings of everything I mention here in old lolcow.farm posts, so that'll have to do. Links to lolcow.farm threads here 1 2 3
The downfall of VocaloidOtaku
For the average internet user in the late 00s and early 10s, forums were a common thing used to get together with your fellow fandom people. The most popular choice for the Vocaloid fandom back then was VocaloidOtaku.
It being the most popular website for Vocaloid fans, before Twitter drama and Amino drama there was VO drama. Naturally it became the #1 hub for drama and bullshit.
The lead admin had a mental breakdown after he was accused of abusing donations, leading to the website shutting down. He used to earn $250/mo in PayPal donations to cover "server costs", even though it was simply a vBulletin message board. That was only part of the reason it shut down however, the main reason was was the rampant pedophilia there.
However, with the website shutting down in April of 2018, the vast majority of drama threads and user pages were never archived due to lack of time to archive it effectively.
Archive of the webpage as it appeared in February of 2018.
Incomplete archives of the website.
Now, the most notable drama there was Luan and Vivi, two vocaloids that were announced by independent companies.
Luan was voiced by a then-prominent milky cow in the spanish fandom, Akuo. Akuo no longer has a presence in the fandom due to VocaloidOtaku shutting down, however he is most notorious for being a two-faced bitch that talks shit about other artists.
Vivi on the other hand, was left unreleased by its parent company VocaTone due to not even owning a license for it. (lol)
Last but not least in this section, a special mention goes to yet another unreleased Vocaloid Stella. Unlike the other two which were made using legal means, this one was made using piracy. Planty-P is another then-prominent cow who pirated multiple Vocaloid voicebanks for redistribution and created Stella out of illegally cross-synthesizing two other voicebanks.
link
Migration to other social media
After VO shut down, Vocaloid fans either migrated to Twitter and Tumblr, left the fandom entirely, or went to open discords.
Discord ties into the next milky situation, the rampant pedophilia problem.
A lot of it is under closed doors or was only on VocaloidOtaku, but here's a few that I could find. There's a mixture of real and fake accusations for content included, and I'm including the fake ones solely for the sake of showing the difference between the two.
VOCAMERICA Scam
During 2016-2017, prominent Vocaloid producer in the west EmpathP and others started up a kickstarter to host Vocaloid concerts over in America. Up until then Miku concerts were a thing in the west, but the goal of this one was to shine a light on other less-known vocaloids.
End result? Like the literal fat cow she is (see: following spoiler) she scams people out of 21k, pocketing the majority and budgeting the whole concert at literally 150 dollars. Everyone that worked for it remained underpaid, some rewards aren't sent out to this day, and after 5 years the only thing the fans got as a "reward" was a shitty model download.
Details of the scam:
https://archive.vn/LPkGv
Now, you may be wondering how the fandom is like nowadays.
At this current point in time, it's filled with children arguing over what Vocaloid ship is more problematic, or how dead Vocaloid producers are literally pedophiles.
The more vocal of the bunch are SJWs, so here's what has been said about it in the SJW Art thread:
This is all barely scratching the surface. Majority of this was old milk, but I wanted to showcase how retarded people can get over singing robots. The UTAU community is one and the same, too. Urging a user to commit suicide over using a voicebank is about as autistic as it can get.
Oh, and an honorable mention goes to twitter user TORA_v4. The drama surrounding him is plentiful, here's a taste of it.
Vocaloid (ボーカロイド, Bōkaroido) is a singing voice synthesizer software product. The software enables users to synthesize "singing" by typing in lyrics and melody. It uses synthesizing technology with specially recorded vocals of voice actors or singers.
Now, the genre of songs made with the program might be associated with cute animu vocal synths nowadays, but it's no doubt that it made such a huge boom in the late 2000s, namely with the arrival of the central character that is formerly the face of the software, Hatsune Miku.
Miku NT, the latest reiteration of Miku after her parent company decided to split off from VOCALOID as a software.
Now, you may be wondering why this software is deserving of a thread. Simply put, anime girl avatar = retardation.
A bit of a history lesson for everyone, Vocaloid was initially released in 2004. Hatsune Miku V1 was released in 2007. Up until that point, few people knew about the software and you're lucky to even find something from that era still up on YouTube or NicoNicoDouga. But then Miku came along and became the catalyst for launching the dinky little synth software into stardom in the music scene - and a fandom into lolcowdom.
In comes the early 2010s, 4chan is still a good place, and most fandoms are kicking off due to widespread of the internet. deco*27, MitchieM and wowaka are the music producers of the most viewed Vocaloid songs ever made, and for good reason.
With young children and even adults just then getting into the music for the pretty anime girls, some wanted their very own Mikus! And so every young teenager made their own equivalent of Miku, either by modifying the voicebanks to make new ones - "derivatives", or to put it in Kiwifarms terms, do nut steel recolors of official voicebanks - or used their very own voices to create a voicebank for poorman's VOCALOID software, UTAU.
Some of the most popular UTAUs.
Now, you may be wondering why this fandom of singing robots needs a thread.
Well, back then in simpler times, all of this was harmless fun. You would see users of the now-defunct VocaloidOtaku forums (more on that in a bit) arguing over whether the mirror Vocaloids Len and Rin were siblings or lovers. You would see genderbends of popular Vocaloids, complete with derivative voicebanks and "official box art" designs.
This continued for a long, long time, even today, with the fandom thriving on constant new songs. Literal hundreds of thousands of Vocaloid songs and song covers were uploaded monthly on NND, and the more successful songs made it over to YouTube with millions of views currently, either by the help of prominent translators and fan-subbers, or the music producers themselves in recent years.
In current day social media however, it is a mess to say the least.
*Take everything here with a grain of salt, the majority of the following milk is beyond expired and there are no screenshots for some, but there are many recountings of everything I mention here in old lolcow.farm posts, so that'll have to do. Links to lolcow.farm threads here 1 2 3
The downfall of VocaloidOtaku
For the average internet user in the late 00s and early 10s, forums were a common thing used to get together with your fellow fandom people. The most popular choice for the Vocaloid fandom back then was VocaloidOtaku.
It being the most popular website for Vocaloid fans, before Twitter drama and Amino drama there was VO drama. Naturally it became the #1 hub for drama and bullshit.
The lead admin had a mental breakdown after he was accused of abusing donations, leading to the website shutting down. He used to earn $250/mo in PayPal donations to cover "server costs", even though it was simply a vBulletin message board. That was only part of the reason it shut down however, the main reason was was the rampant pedophilia there.
However, with the website shutting down in April of 2018, the vast majority of drama threads and user pages were never archived due to lack of time to archive it effectively.
Archive of the webpage as it appeared in February of 2018.
Incomplete archives of the website.
Now, the most notable drama there was Luan and Vivi, two vocaloids that were announced by independent companies.
Luan was voiced by a then-prominent milky cow in the spanish fandom, Akuo. Akuo no longer has a presence in the fandom due to VocaloidOtaku shutting down, however he is most notorious for being a two-faced bitch that talks shit about other artists.
Vivi on the other hand, was left unreleased by its parent company VocaTone due to not even owning a license for it. (lol)
Last but not least in this section, a special mention goes to yet another unreleased Vocaloid Stella. Unlike the other two which were made using legal means, this one was made using piracy. Planty-P is another then-prominent cow who pirated multiple Vocaloid voicebanks for redistribution and created Stella out of illegally cross-synthesizing two other voicebanks.
Hey, Planty here. To preface this post, yes, I'm a shitheel who did a lot of shitty things to some people who may not have deserved it. BUT, that being said, my Vocaloid career is over and in the past, and I reaped what I sowed. However, there are some things that have been on my spirit and I would like to share them with you guys; "Spill the Tea", as it were. Tea on myself and tea on others; as a semi-popular Vocaloid producer, I was privy to a lot of things that went down behind the scenes. Some innocent, some not. So let's start from the top.
I never hacked any Vocaloids. Hacking things was never in my skillset; I wasn't that smart. AlexVox was the one who cracked and distributed Project 575 and AnonKanon, I simply used them. Because I was typically the first to use a newly-cracked Vocaloid, I was constantly the one who was blamed for cracking them. That simply wasn't true. Was using them a shitty thing to do? Absolutely. But I never cracked anything; again, wasn't smart enough.
STELLA was my biggest fuckup, but she wasn't meant to be what she was. She was originally supposed to just be a XSY-made Vocaloid, a legal one, too (between two Miku V4 voices). But she had a story, a much deeper story that I was to afraid to share, given my already negative status in the fandom.
See, Crusher and I (she went by Cien) were actually quite close. I would mix things for her, we'd talk extensively on Skype, I even went to my first ever anime convention with her (she was dressed as Fem!Prussia from Hetalia). Although I genuinely liked her, she always came off as really cold and dismissive to me sometimes. But, I was around 15-16, so I was STUPID. I was in this part of my life where I desperately wanted everyone to like me, so I would do anything, say anything, and put up with anything. Luckily, I've outgrown that phase, but back then I would do literally anything Cien asked of me.
Again, by my standards, this friendship was pretty close. Looking back, I realized I was really just more of an industry friend or acquaintance to her (or, more accurately, someone to use). I was working at an appliance store at the time, and i was ALWAYS on Skype or Twitter mobile because I was constantly checking in with my Vocaloid friends/socials. I was obsessed with it, honestly; I loved the tech, loved the music, I was just enthralled, and had been for years. It was actually kind of unhealthy how much weight I put on it (again, I've outgrown that). But one day, Cien just stopped talking to me. Straight up ghosted my ass. And I was so confused, because I didn't think I had done anything wrong?
I had known they were struggling with mental health issues, some pretty serious ones (or so I believed, I don't know what the truth was), so I was extremely worried. Cien was always a really dark, semi-suicidal person, and my 15-16 year old mind immediately went into crisis mode; "Oh my god, Cien's finally killed herself", etc etc. After a few weeks, she sent me a message telling me she was fine, she had self-harmed and was in the hospital.
So, like any good friend, I really wanted to find out what was bothering her, talk to her, stuff like that. She wasn't having it. She got extremely mad when I asked her if she was okay or if there was anything I can do, and told me not to tell ANYONE about it.
I agreed, but I got even more worried when she started displaying this behavior again. So I DM'd Circus (who I was talking to at the time), and asked him if he had noticed anything weird or wrong with Cien. At this point, I should've left it all alone and gone about my business. But again, undercooked brain, young stupidity.
BOTH of them got irate that I asked if Cien was okay, and they both literally removed my from their friends lists and blocked me. And for what??? It happened so fast, and without warning. I was just so confused, but mostly I was HURT. I had considered Cien a good friend of mine, and to have her just cut me off for no reason, I didn't know how to cope.
So STELLA was born. I wanted to create a Vocaloid as a way to get back at her, a sort of "ha-ha, I made one and you didn't" sort of thing. To me, creating a Vocaloid was the ultimate badge of honor. I dreamed about making them, it was literally my waking fantasy. Originally, STELLA was meant to just be a cross-synth voice billed as a "Virtual Idol", but I got greedy. I had already applied for a Vocaloid license and was denied, three times. I was getting frustrated because I was just hurt and confused and going through a lot (when you're that young, everything seems like the world is ending). So the fake XSY hack was created. I didn't know how to tell the others that this had turned from a legit revenge scheme to a fake one; I was embarassed and honestly, I should've never taken it this far. None of the STELLA team knew that she was originally a sort of get-back plot, I was going to keep that to myself if she was succesful (and we see how that turned out).
I was never going to keep any of the money for STELLA, it was all going to go to the Arts Charity. Additionally, while we're here, I never plagiarized any music. I purchased sample packs, sort of songs that are split apart and are able to be put back together. They're obviously not very creative and many people purchased the same packs as me, leading to the same sounds. (Like for real people, how could I create a perfect karaoke of a vocal song that had no karaoke released? Or edit the midi data for a song that had already been rendered???) But my status was already so low in the community, nobody wanted to hear it haha.
Giraffey and Nageko and PianoBench and the others didn't deserve the bad publicity, they were all very very very kind to me, far kinder than I deserved. But, what is done is done, and I can't take it back. I've also apoligized and worked through my own self-guilt about the whole situation; it was a horrible, stupid thing I did. But I was young, and I can't let it hang over me forever. I've apologized and coped with it, and I'm mostly over it.
But Cien… that person is horrible, manipulative, and spiteful. Even more than me. A few weeks after the STELLA fiasco, CirCrush broke up because she was hoarding the YT revenue money and not allowing Circus access to the rights for their songs.
AND WHILE WE'RE HERE WITH TEA!!!!!
AkiGlancy and I were in a Skype call and she ripped Creep-P's music apart; calling it horrible, discordant, and disgusting, then turns around and is nice as a peach to him later and wants to be on his album. (This wouldn't be a big thing if not for the FERVOR she tore his music apart, I was like DAMN okay CHILL DAMN OKAYYY)
ALSO! Creep-P gave all of his Macne banks to me and others (back when Nana wasn't a Vocaloid), then goes on a crusade against POCALOID and illegally acquired banks. He also had this HORRIBLE thing on Skype where he would use Homestuck typing quirks (his favorite was the Eridan one where the w's are vv's and stuff), and would get extremely pissy when I asked him to stop for a bit. It was grating when he would do the aLtErNaTiNG caps thing, especially.
AND! Misha called my Ring Suzune revival project (the mess that was JEWEL), a horrible, derivative ripoff when her own UTAU, Makune Hachi, is a derivative ripoff of Macne Nana (then proceeded to sic her followers on me). Some self-awareness would've been nice.
Cien discontinued Daisy because she wasn't able to monetize it; PLOGUE told her that since Daisy was a testing library and not up to standard, monetizing it would not be right. So she demanded they pull it from their site.
In the English version of "Tell Your World" which is on kz livetune's Reial album, I helped Circus with the phonetics on the VSQ, but he refused to credit me for it.
Cien got mad and demanded I take down a remix of ECHO I made because "It made her uncomfortable" and was "being positively received".
Aki at one point told me I should quit Vocaloid as Planty and make up a new name because I was never going to be big in the community with my checkered past. I actually met Aki at a con and she was quite nice in person, if a little disingenuous.
There were more things but this all happened such a long time ago, I can't remember anything else. If I do, I'll post it.
In retrospect, I fucked up ALOTTTTT. Messed up a lot and wasted a lot of chances. But I kept quiet about a lot of the fucked up shit that happened to me as well. This is not a WAHHHH I'M PLANTY I WAS MESSED WITH post. I deserved to be called out and I deserved to be ousted from the community. But rest assured many of the other producers have done fucked up things with more regularity, they were just much better at hiding it. So this is a sort of catharsis for me, a way for me to get all of this shit off my back and put this community behind me for good. Thanks for reading.
link
Migration to other social media
After VO shut down, Vocaloid fans either migrated to Twitter and Tumblr, left the fandom entirely, or went to open discords.
Discord ties into the next milky situation, the rampant pedophilia problem.
A lot of it is under closed doors or was only on VocaloidOtaku, but here's a few that I could find. There's a mixture of real and fake accusations for content included, and I'm including the fake ones solely for the sake of showing the difference between the two.
VOCAMERICA Scam
During 2016-2017, prominent Vocaloid producer in the west EmpathP and others started up a kickstarter to host Vocaloid concerts over in America. Up until then Miku concerts were a thing in the west, but the goal of this one was to shine a light on other less-known vocaloids.
End result? Like the literal fat cow she is (see: following spoiler) she scams people out of 21k, pocketing the majority and budgeting the whole concert at literally 150 dollars. Everyone that worked for it remained underpaid, some rewards aren't sent out to this day, and after 5 years the only thing the fans got as a "reward" was a shitty model download.
Details of the scam:
https://archive.vn/LPkGv
Now, you may be wondering how the fandom is like nowadays.
At this current point in time, it's filled with children arguing over what Vocaloid ship is more problematic, or how dead Vocaloid producers are literally pedophiles.
The more vocal of the bunch are SJWs, so here's what has been said about it in the SJW Art thread:
This is all barely scratching the surface. Majority of this was old milk, but I wanted to showcase how retarded people can get over singing robots. The UTAU community is one and the same, too. Urging a user to commit suicide over using a voicebank is about as autistic as it can get.
Oh, and an honorable mention goes to twitter user TORA_v4. The drama surrounding him is plentiful, here's a taste of it.
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