ミクミク

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Remember when I was talking about how Rin became (for the lack of a better word…) sexy and wanted to track down some info about it? Well, I did some “research” on it (Rin’s eyes were just beckoning to me, I swear!), which meant I just poked around Nico Nico Douga for a bit and found something dreadfully interesting…

… I was being tempted by a vampire.

http://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm2916956

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Anyone remembered the “April Fools joke” by Nico Nico Douga stating there’s going to be a Gackt vocaloid? Apparently it was not a joke.

Press release from Internet.

The page includes a link to the news release PDF (which I can’t view) and a streaming to “The Grandfather’s Clock” sang by Gackpoid.

According to 2ch, Gackpoid uses YAMAHA’s Vocaloid 2 Engine and is schedule for release sometime in June, 2008.

Miku domination… What else is new? Ah, yes… the April wars managed to sustain itself to the first few days of May, so lotsa new songs here. Oh, and another thing: KAITO is being really, really scary this week… dubya… tee… eff… *sweatdrop*

I don’t even have the urge to ramble on that much after seeing KAITO… uuuuurgh~ xp

Shenanigans… ranking comments… after the break!

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Roughly a month ago we talked about how to register a new Nico Nico Douga account. For easier categorization, that part will now be part one of these simple walkthroughs, and therefore this part is part two.

This time we will look at the basic player functions as well as the commenting system. After you login and click on a Nico Nico Douga video, you will see a screen similar to this…

Playback Functions

The functions below the video are pretty self explanatory. The first few probably don’t have to be explained. From left to right you have play/pause, rewind, search bar, elapsed/total time, mute, volume, comment, repeat, and window.

The comment button turns on/off the comments on the videos. Nico Nico Douga has an unique commenting system where comments appear right on the video. The good thing about this is that you can see what others think of a particular segment in the whole clip, however, the comments can be annoying or obstructive at times and this buttons will help you switch comments off.

The window button will get rid of all the unnecessary parts above and below the video, therefore giving you a bigger video to look at (however, on my wide screen notebook, it hardly makes any difference in terms of size).

Commenting

Below the playback functions row you have two comment input boxes. The first box is for scripts (changes how comments look), and the second box (the longer one) is for your comments. The button to the right (コメントする) sends your comment.

There are different types of scripts. I’ve copy and pasted and translated the list of scripts provided in Nico Nico Douga’s help page…

Type	Command/Effects
Comment Position	Above ( ue ) Below ( shita )
Comment Size	Big ( big ) Small ( small )
Color	Red ( red ) Blue ( blue ) Cyan ( cyan ) Green ( green ) et cetera…

The scripts should go into the script box without the brackets, and should be separated by a space. For example, if you want a small blue comment at the bottom, you should put shita small blue into the script box.

Other Functions

To the right of the video you have other tidbits of information and functions. 再生 tells you how many times the video has been played back, コメント shows the number of comments, and マイリスト shows how many times the video has been added to My List (kind of like favorites function).

A bit further down you have a bunch of tabs. The ones you’ll be using most will probably be 最新コメント and オススメ. 最新コメント will show you the newest comments and オススメ will show a bunch of video recommendations (kind of like YouTube’s “Related Videos” function).

-Fin-

That’s about it for now… With these functions you should be able to enjoy the videos on Nico Nico Douga and make use of the unique commenting system. Hope this simple walkthrough was helpful to you.

Saw this at 初音ミクみく just now. Re:moto, the guy who created the Miku flash player you see in the sidebar of this site, created a new version of the player called Vocaloid Fullmix Player.

The new player functions pretty much like the old one, except the new player now include songs by other Vocaloids (Meiko, Kaito, Kagamine Rin/Len) as well as the spin off variations (Yowane Haku, Akita Neru).

Unlike the previous version where people can just grab the code and post it in their blog or site, the new player requires you to create a playlist first through the Vocaloid Fullmix Player PlayListGenerator. The code will be provided after the playlist is created.

Here’s just a random playlist I created to compare songs with the Yowane Haku version. Yowane Haku’s songs are just too funny and cute…

Additional notes: When you play a song the singers’ icons will be displayed at the top of the player. It will tell you who’s singing the songs.

While randomly looking through YouTube just now I ran into this cute 3D CG video with Vocaloid Nendoroids dancing to the song “Kurutto, Odotte, Hatsune Miku.” After seeing it, I couldn’t resist the urge to share it with everyone here. Yes, it is an old video indeed, but I just couldn’t resist…

Some of you might have noticed a new link in the “Related Links” list off the the side. For those who didn’t, I’d like to introduce you all to Miyuki’s great blog called Mi’s Vocaloid Log. It started back in early March and is a “KAITO-centric vocaloid log that covers anything Vocaloid-related.”

I’m extremely sorry for noticing her blog so late. As you all know, I had a series of essays, tests and exams from March all the way into late April. Enough excuses from me and let us move back to the main topic of this post…

The blog is (for the most part) in English, with bits of Japanese here and there. It is updated daily and covers a lot of Vocaloid related information and things of interest. The layout is clean and easy to navigate through and the posts are straight to the point (unlike this blog where I tend to ramble a lot). A definite bookmark for all Vocaloid fans.

That’s it from me… Give it a visit and hope you enjoy her posts…

For those of you who missed the link, you can access it by clicking here.

Copy & pasting from my own blog:

【ニコニコ動画】【初音ミク】 PROLOGUE 【ぼかりす】

The song shown is adjusted using a new technology called “VocaListener”, which supposedly mimic the way the source vocal sings/talks and adjust the vocaloid parameters accordingly to make it sound human.

The technology will be discussed during the 128th Human-Computer Interaction Workshop (rough translation), which takes place from May 28 to 29.

This is definitely something to look forward to. The example song shown in the video sounds amazingly like actual human singing voice.

Source: Mi’s Vocaloid Log

*Yaaaaawn~!* (looks around for a bit…) Oh, hey! The ranking’s been up for a few hours now hasn’t it? Well then, time to get cracking!

Anyways… It’s a sad, sad day for Rin/Len fans out there as KOKORO and Gekokujo have finally fallen out of the Top 30, even going as far as placing on the 59th and 60th spots respectively (this make me a very sad panda ;_;). Now, Miku practically dominates the charts which is chocked full of her new releases as well as some surprise comebacks… And, finally, an e-LiveTune song that should’ve been in last week’s chart finally gets the ranking it deserves!

Now, there is talk on the forums about another “war” that went on the 4th week of April called the Spring Vocaloid Festival (thank AsaMiyuki for this tidbit of info…), but I seriously can’t be bothered to care at this point ‘coz I’m so happy with the outcome of this week’s ranking (KOKORO and Gekokujo getting the boot aside…).

Comments and shenanigans after the break!

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Someone by the name of Food took Miku Miku ni Shiteageru♪ and did some sound editing to it. From what I can hear he added some kind of 3D effect to it (perfect for those surround sound systems I think). It was uploaded to Nico Nico Douga not long ago.

I don’t know whether this version two is official or not, but it sounds just as great as the original (some people might not like the echo effect though).

On an interesting side note, I never knew that the abbreviation of Miku Miku ni Shiteageru♪ was “MicMic” until I saw it for the first time today.