What Are Voctro Labs' Vocaloid Virtual Singers?

Voctro Labs' Vocaloid Virtual Singers are three singing voice libraries — Bruno, Clara, and MAIKA — made for Yamaha's VOCALOID software. They are aimed at end users, amateur musicians, and professional musicians, and they run on Windows and OSX. If you already use VOCALOID and want additional singing voices for song production, these are the products to consider; if you are looking for voice interaction in apps or games, Voctro Labs' Voiceful toolkit is the relevant product instead.

What VOCALOID is

VOCALOID is a singing voice synthesizer developed and commercialized by Yamaha Corp since 2003. It is the result of a joint research collaboration between Yamaha's R&D division in Japan and the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Spain, carried out by Voctro Labs' co-founders. In practice, VOCALOID is the host software; the virtual singers are voice libraries that plug into it.

The three virtual singers

All three are listed by Voctro Labs as products for end users, amateur and professional musicians.

Who they are for

• End users and hobbyists who want to produce singing vocals without recording a human singer.
• Amateur musicians writing and arranging songs at home.
• Professional musicians who need synthesized singing voices as part of a production.

The common requirement across all three groups is the same: you need Yamaha's VOCALOID software as the environment, since the Voctro Labs singers are libraries for it rather than standalone applications.

How this fits with Voctro Labs' other products

Voctro Labs describes itself as bringing AI-based voice, music, and audio technologies to creative companies and individuals. Its product line splits along a clear line:

• Vocaloid Virtual Singers — singing voice synthesis for music production, via Yamaha's VOCALOID, on Windows and OSX.
• Voiceful — a toolkit for designing digital and mobile experiences with speech and singing voice, offered as a cloud-based API plus SDK libraries for mobile, tablet, and desktop applications, targeting games, mobile apps, and IoT devices across iOS, Android, Unity, Windows, OSX, and Linux.

So the choice depends on the output you want: a sung vocal track for a song points to the Vocaloid Virtual Singers; interactive voice features inside an app or device point to Voiceful.

Background on Voctro Labs

Voctro Labs was founded in 2011 by four audio experts, with offices in Barcelona, and licenses its technology worldwide. Its clients are creative media companies in music, videogames, apps, advertising, and film. The team brings 15+ years of applied research experience at MTG-UPF and has collaborated with companies including Yamaha Corp. (Japan), with public funding from the European Commission's FP7 and H2020 programs. The cofounders are inventors on more than fifty patents and coauthors of more than a hundred scientific publications.