Luka Megurine

Luka Megurine is the third Vocaloid2 in Crypton’s character series. Her character details were released on the 5th of January 2009. She will be in stores January the 30th, 2009. According to the details on Crypton’s website, her profile is as follows:

The name “Megurine” can be read in Japanese as the “sound that travels (the whole wide world),” and the name Luka invokes the homonymous Japanese words of “nagare” (flowing) and “ka” (song) or “kaori” (scent).

Yuu Asakawa provides Luka’s ‘cool, yet husky feminine voice’.

Unlike its previous two characters, Crypton advertised Luka’s 3GB vocal database as “Japanese/English bilingual” and chose her name to express its hope that she will transcend borders and cultural barriers. Luka was designed by the Japanese illustrator Kei, who had previously created the designs for Hatsune Miku and Kagamine Rin and Len. However, unlike previous mascots in the series, her costume is not based on a school uniform.

Only a few days after her release, many songs were produced. On the 70th Weekly Vocaloid Ranking (February 2, 2009), many of Luka’s songs appeared in the Top 30, knocking the very popular “Miku Miku ni Shite Ageru” and songs produced by ryo (with the exception of “Melt”) right out of the Top 30. “RIP=RELEASE” had taken the #1 spot, and had earned a total of 843,233 points, making it the song with the highest one-week score.

Due to her bilingual coding, her “moody yet husky female voice” carries over into both languages and was designed to handle moodier genres like Jazz. Overall, Luka serves to bridge the gap between both languages and has proven to be her appeal as a vocaloid. She serves as an ideal vocaloid for English speaking users planning to use Japanese vocaloids and vice versa for users who are not so used to speaking English and planning on using English Vocaloids. Since she speaks both languages, Luka is able to partner with both Japanese and English vocaloids respectfully.

When installing Luka, it is important to pay attention to the release dates of Vocaloids you plan to install after her. Older and newer versions of the Vocaloid 2 software engine can occasionally cause conflicts. Luka has both language engines, so she can cause conflicts between Vocaloids of either language. A user can fix this problem if it occurs simply by installing the Vocaloids in release date order, Luka is noted to be the most likely Vocaloid to produce this conflict.

Luka’s Japanese dictionary is extensive and on par with previous Japanese Vocaloids and there are no known problems with that part of her program. Also, as a Japanese vocaloid, she has all of the phonemes that are often missing from English vocaloids such as the 5 breathing phonemes ([br1]-[br5]). It is reported that she may produce a lisp-like sound on some notes however, she still maintains a more mature tone then previous Crypton Vocaloid 2 era voicebanks.

She has all the English phonemes that English vocaloids have in her voice databank. However, despite the inclusion of English she was not intended for a world wide release, because of this, a number of reported problems are present in her voicebanks. It has been reported that she does not seem to have many distinct vowel related diphongs in her sample library in her English voicebank, making her sound slightly choppy when some phonetics are used together. In other cases, she may not have enough distinction between the phonetic sounds in her samples that she does have to distinguish one pronunciation from another. She also has only the main/common words in her dictionary, so users not used to more complicated English words may have some difficulty when they come across them, however, an extra data library of English words for her English dictionary is available.

Her voicebank may be considered “sub-standard” to other English capable Vocaloids and her overall results will depend on the user. She is not unusable and still can be used for most English songs. There are also no major report glitches with her voicebank as other English capable Vocaloids and her sample quality is considered good despite her flaws. As a bilingual Vocaloid, she has superior capability of the English language than the Japanese only vocaloids. If need be, less than confident users can use an another English capable vocaloid to aid in fixing her dictionary flaws or help to harmonize her results so she appears smoother.