News Roundup
I'm not actually dead - an assortment of RL business left me with no time the last couple of weeks, and even the three concert posts crept up on me without warning, so my apologies there. Two catchup roundups are underway and sitting in my notepad - the first should be up tomorrow, roughly hitting last week or so, and there'll be another one Thurs or Fri to get us fully back up to date.
While I'm at it, some news!
- The Crypton twitter got, uh, a little busy recently! Aside from confirmation of Meiko Append and talk about Miku English coming out 'by the end of the year' (a little off from Crypton's original timeframe of, you know, last year...) it also seems that whoever was in charge of it Thanksgiving Weekend decided to start tweeting while drunk, rather sulkily taking swipes out of a potential business partner and then having to apologise rather profusely.
- Miku's Google+ page has announced a colloborative project with Google to try to get Vocaloid listeners into participating in production. Or at least learning about production. Maybe? It's a little hard to tell, as Crypton still seem kind of incapable of getting someone other than a machine to do their Facebook and Google+ translations. The release is here, and it seems like the idea is that they're going to reveal the producer they're profiling on the 13th and, one assumes, go through their creative process. In the meantime, viewers are encouraged to watch the 39s video and figure out who the producer is!... which is a little tricky, when there's no lyrics and not a lot of instrumentation...
- Speaking of the big Google: the official, full-length video for Tell Your World is out, produced by Wakamura. Visually, it's a substantial treat, if a little busy on the eyes; Wakamura is one of the best in the business for using MME and some of the things he can marshal the engine into pulling off are breathtaking - see the spacescape at the end of the video for a prime example. But the rest of it leaves a little to be desired - facebook camera angles and poses, a lack of any real substantive dance or action... it doesn't do anything, and I think that's a tremendous shame after the short version managed to be so heartwarming and inspiring. If you extended the Google version out to four minutes and just roped in as many bits of fandom as you could into it, I'd be deliriously happy with it as a PV.
- Suzune Ring's got a couple new demos out, the first concrete information we've had on her in some time: Village Girl Dreaming (Nico) and Ice World (Nico), both by LambdaSK and a whole host of people at Vocanext. The thing is, I honestly can't muster up much of an opinion on these just yet - the voicebank doesn't seem refined enough to really garner an original opinion on the content, it's still at the stage of being a generic female Vocaloid voice. I do appreciate the wah-wah and the farmyard animals, though, don't get me wrong.
- So, if you wanted Miku on your iPhone, Sega is here to provide with Miku Flick. The preview video, as well as reaffirming that I'm heartily sick of Koi Suru Vocaloid, suggests the gameplay revolves around Ouendan-style stylus movements where you flick a given hiragana in a specific direction. If you're the sort to go for that, the JP iTunes page is here, though an english-language version is in the works.
- A smorgasbord of Gumi news: for one, the Native version (i.e. the V3 upgrade for her normal voice) is now on sale for the substantial cost of 11k yen. In slightly more bizarre news, peperon is helping out with a colloboration between... Lawson and Gumi... seems a bit random to me, but hey! It kicks off on 3/14, streaming music and offering downloads in most Lawson stores for a month, provided you have the smartphone, the technology, and the access to Japan to use it.
- This might be the most ambitious bit of ascii art around. Here's the reduced image if you're having trouble visualising it in full.
- Uh... I guess Peru now has a stadium named after Miku? Is... is that what I'm seeing here?
- A presentation on the 'Open Source Nature of Vocaloid' was performed at the SXSW Music Festival, a sentence I didn't expect to type any time soon.
- Staggeringly, Aoki Lapis of the I-Style Project, the company able to produce a thousand promotional shows without any actual content to display, will be released on the 6th April to what will surely be a horde of adoring fans. She's also just finished up in a charity event for the Japanese Earthquake Anniversary, which is all well and good, but... ... but even Crypton doesn't do this many events and appearances and they actually have product released. Is I-style one massive hallucination? I keep being unable to believe it!
While I'm at it, some news!
- The Crypton twitter got, uh, a little busy recently! Aside from confirmation of Meiko Append and talk about Miku English coming out 'by the end of the year' (a little off from Crypton's original timeframe of, you know, last year...) it also seems that whoever was in charge of it Thanksgiving Weekend decided to start tweeting while drunk, rather sulkily taking swipes out of a potential business partner and then having to apologise rather profusely.
- Miku's Google+ page has announced a colloborative project with Google to try to get Vocaloid listeners into participating in production. Or at least learning about production. Maybe? It's a little hard to tell, as Crypton still seem kind of incapable of getting someone other than a machine to do their Facebook and Google+ translations. The release is here, and it seems like the idea is that they're going to reveal the producer they're profiling on the 13th and, one assumes, go through their creative process. In the meantime, viewers are encouraged to watch the 39s video and figure out who the producer is!... which is a little tricky, when there's no lyrics and not a lot of instrumentation...
- Speaking of the big Google: the official, full-length video for Tell Your World is out, produced by Wakamura. Visually, it's a substantial treat, if a little busy on the eyes; Wakamura is one of the best in the business for using MME and some of the things he can marshal the engine into pulling off are breathtaking - see the spacescape at the end of the video for a prime example. But the rest of it leaves a little to be desired - facebook camera angles and poses, a lack of any real substantive dance or action... it doesn't do anything, and I think that's a tremendous shame after the short version managed to be so heartwarming and inspiring. If you extended the Google version out to four minutes and just roped in as many bits of fandom as you could into it, I'd be deliriously happy with it as a PV.
- Suzune Ring's got a couple new demos out, the first concrete information we've had on her in some time: Village Girl Dreaming (Nico) and Ice World (Nico), both by LambdaSK and a whole host of people at Vocanext. The thing is, I honestly can't muster up much of an opinion on these just yet - the voicebank doesn't seem refined enough to really garner an original opinion on the content, it's still at the stage of being a generic female Vocaloid voice. I do appreciate the wah-wah and the farmyard animals, though, don't get me wrong.
- So, if you wanted Miku on your iPhone, Sega is here to provide with Miku Flick. The preview video, as well as reaffirming that I'm heartily sick of Koi Suru Vocaloid, suggests the gameplay revolves around Ouendan-style stylus movements where you flick a given hiragana in a specific direction. If you're the sort to go for that, the JP iTunes page is here, though an english-language version is in the works.
- A smorgasbord of Gumi news: for one, the Native version (i.e. the V3 upgrade for her normal voice) is now on sale for the substantial cost of 11k yen. In slightly more bizarre news, peperon is helping out with a colloboration between... Lawson and Gumi... seems a bit random to me, but hey! It kicks off on 3/14, streaming music and offering downloads in most Lawson stores for a month, provided you have the smartphone, the technology, and the access to Japan to use it.
- This might be the most ambitious bit of ascii art around. Here's the reduced image if you're having trouble visualising it in full.
- Uh... I guess Peru now has a stadium named after Miku? Is... is that what I'm seeing here?
- A presentation on the 'Open Source Nature of Vocaloid' was performed at the SXSW Music Festival, a sentence I didn't expect to type any time soon.
- Staggeringly, Aoki Lapis of the I-Style Project, the company able to produce a thousand promotional shows without any actual content to display, will be released on the 6th April to what will surely be a horde of adoring fans. She's also just finished up in a charity event for the Japanese Earthquake Anniversary, which is all well and good, but... ... but even Crypton doesn't do this many events and appearances and they actually have product released. Is I-style one massive hallucination? I keep being unable to believe it!