Too many announcements to do...

Hello, Nynthixia there

Here to make a sort of point on the current advancement. And there are many many things to tell.

1) Albums

On Saturday you'll get the album "Stars Going Extinct", which features for the first time Xingchen, Rikka and Karin... It's a 22 tracks album which also contains 2 songs for the Lovecraft series, the penultimate Truth edit as well as 3 songs for the main lore series. Xingchen, Qing Su, Rikka and Karin (the 2 latters being in a single song).

I'm currently working on the CD35.5. For now it's called "Ancestral Destiny" and has... 23 tracks. Initially it had 25 but I'll explain later why it lost 2 tracks.

For now I only did 2 of the 23 tracks. A private song with Feng Yi and the deadlined song for Meiji. These songs will introduce a new mixdown method that I'm going to explain later as well.

CD35.5 contains all deadlines for August and September, so expect some Lily, CUL, Meiji, Akari, VY1, Wistaria, MAYU, Xingchen, Karin and Tsuina in the lot... As well as Feng Yi who will make her appearence!

2) Vocals

RIME: I got the information when I got back from work, but RIME has been moved to autumn 2022. This is why the CD35.5 lost 2 tracks. Her tracks were moved to the WIP tracklist of CD36 (I make at least 1 tracklist ahead from the one I'm working upon) which contained only very few works as well, so it did a good move for me.

Xia Yu Yao: she is having a crowdfunding right now. I know it because I saw the tweet being deleted, but I am very confident the engine will be SynthV. So main registerings in Mandarin, use of Japanese and English via cross-lingual. For the ones who are wondering... I decided to participate in this crowdfunding day one. I took the simple physical solution (solution A, early bird version). I'm just hoping Xia Yu Yao will have her revenge over her Japanese UTAU voicebank which has sadly many flaws, explaining why she didn't get pass the quality test back in 2019 that Bibi and Wistaria also had.

Bandori girls (Toyama Kasumi, Minato Yukina): awaiting for the demos which will probably come after end June. Still no official confirmation unlike the two above.

ROSA: to be honest I was expecting the crowdfunding for her SynthV voicebank to start on ROSA's day, June 3rd, which didn't happen. So I'm still waiting for its start. Also just learnt EMS was reopening for France starting from tomorrow, which I'm quite glad about, so that means no restriction for being sent the package!

Quadimension girls: I still have hope especially since Cangqiong's last cross-lingual demo. So cryogenic room plan still ongoing.

Chis-A: I confirm her for September, whenever her engine will get released. It got rebranded into VoiSona. This should be normally the only character from this engine I'll be using, for the simple and unique reason that I HATE the subscription system. This is why I don't get many Waves plugins or why I don't use Adobe Premiere and I use VEGAS Pro instead.

3) Heavy change in mixdown method

For the ones who didn't follow my Twitter, here is a very huge announcement that will be important to you especially starting on August 8, 2022, first date where you'll have a demo concerned by this change.

The mixdown method has been revamped, especially with an exchange of plugins and a different final result.

Before June, I was using VEGAS Pro to mixdown. The software has ExpressFX, which are DirectX plugins, not VST plugins. After, you got the Neutron 3 Advanced (base), followed by Vocal Doubler (except for UTAU songs, this is mainly because UTAU is mixed down with several capellas when other engines only use a single one, so deepness), then Nectar 3 Plus (specialization), Nectar Elements legacy (volume enhancement) and Ozone 9 Advanced (final touch/harshness reduction of the plugins accumulated results).

Starting from August 8, 2022 and CD35.5 the mixdown method will be the following:

- FL Studio is being used for plugins remastering for EACH capella file (so there will be minimum 2 outputs for UTAU (main + cho) and 1 for other engines (mixdown)).
- ExpressFX disappears (FL Studio doesn't support DirectX plugins) and is replaced by Neoverb (iZotope plugin too)
- Neutron 3 Advanced is replaced by Neutron 4 (which is the culprit of this change!)
- the rest of the chain remains unchanged
- each remastered track is included in VEGAS Pro for applying the final compressor and rendering

So for the why I don't directly mixdown in FL Studio... You get the answer with some covers and remixes I did. The compressor from FL Studio is actually heavily reducing the volume of the instrumental when the capella is playing, which is not the case with the mockup preset on VEGAS Pro's compressor effect. It makes you a sort of audio spectrum where you see a very huge increase of volume compared to the instrumental. This is typical of a rendering under VEGAS Pro.

The reason why I'm using FL Studio for this step of mixdown is that VEGAS Pro doesn't support officially VST3 plugins. Since Steinberg stopped the support of VST2 AND stopped giving new licenses for VST2 to companies, Neutron 4 was made to not have a VST2 version. Only a VST3 one. So VEGAS doesn't see it and doesn't display it in the effects list. Until this is resolved, FL Studio will be used as intermediary for mixing down the projects. I really hope this gets fixed in August for VEGAS Pro 20. I count on you MAGIX guys!

So as comparison:

Former:
ExpressFX Reverb -> Vocal Doubler* -> Neutron 3 Advanced -> Nectar 3 Plus -> Nectar Elements (legacy) -> Ozone 9 Advanced

New:
Neoverb -> Vocal Doubler* -> Neutron 4 -> Nectar 3 Plus -> Nectar Elements (legacy) -> Ozone 9 Advanced

* songs using SynthV, VOCALOID and CeVIO only

And, will this change a lot the rendering to the ear? For having tested the two first songs using the new method... Yeah, it changes a lot. Mainly because there are two renderings, and still, the first one is still under wav (when final mixdown is rendered as mp3 files).

This won't be the thing that will make the season change though. We are still in season 5 right now and CD35.5 will contain season 5 songs. It will contain season 6 songs only if FL Studio 21 releases as a release candidate a strict minima. And seems FL 21 is not for now seeing at which step of testing they are (they are currently mainly testing a new browser, not the new effects and stuff yet).

So... That's all for the categories. No major acquisitions otherwise. Just little library upgrades. And even if there were just three categories, there was a lot to explain and to tell.

For reminder, you'll get a yandere song with Tei in 10 days.

See you soon!

Nynthixia

PS: happy birthday to sele by the way (again)! Because remember if there wasn't sele, Nynthixia wouldn't have existed at all.