VOCALOID

'Vocaloid' is th term used for a voice synthesising software made by yamaha that was first began development in 2000 and released in 2004. As of now, there are 6 different vocaloid engines that can be used, however, most are out of date or extremely rare to find (or juest retired, like the original engine)

Vocaloid has also inspired many other voice synthesising softwares, most notably UTAU, which is a free to use software simmilar to vocaloid (but more affordable, since vocaloid engines can range up to £400+, not including how much popular voice banks would be.Theres also synthv, which is well known for updating popular voice banks and making them easily accesable, such as kasane teto and gumi

However, I don't really care about the engine as much as I care about the characters, namely the cryptonloids (name used for vocaloids owned by crypton future media). The cryptonloids are THE most popular vsynths, being so popular that they actually arent even oficially vocaloids now! vocaloids such as miku, rin/len, luka, meiko, and kaito are now no longer sold on the official vocaloid website (trust me, I literally just checked). Instead, these vocaloids are sold on the pairpo website, which is still a company owned by crypton like vocaloid, but different softwares.

I'm not entirely sure why this is, as this happened years ago. But, from what people are saying, the reason why this change was made was because of the fact that crypton (the owner of the cryptonloids) and yamaha (the people who made the vocaloid software) ended their partnership, this caused crypton to move their characters away from vocaloid and now sell their characters through their own engine

common misconseptions

"all vocaloid is AI"

No! While the more recent engines do use AI, the voicebanks that are used are actually people's voices that have been recorded saying certain vowels, and those vowels have been turned into letters, which can then be made to make songs! (however, some engines may use AI to make things like tuning or pitching easier, but I can't confirm that)

"vocaloid is child labour"

(I've actually seen this claim be made on tiktok, so this is very real) Most voicebanks have their voices provided willingly by adults, however, even if a child was to provide their voice, yamaha would have to ask for the parent's for permission, and even then all voice providers get payed in commission (?) everytime the voicebank gains profit

"*insert character here* can't be miku!"

THEY CAN!! This is more leaning towards the whole rabbit hole thing, but if theres a character that uses ANY vocaloid's likeness (even in different outfits/ slight design changes), that is basically a deriative of that vocaloid. Take Miku's different outfits in project diva for example, although they all may have different designs, they are all still all considered miku. Ofcourse, this is different when it comes to things such as the owner of said character saying that they don't have anything to do with miku or any vocaloid