VocaDB - What is it for?
Overview
VocaDB is a free to use collaborative database for Vocaloid, UTAU and other singing synthesizers, with artists, discography, PVs and more. Our goal is to be the most accurate and complete source of Vocaloid discography and artists.
Anyone is able to contribute and correct existing information by creating an account. Artists are encouraged to add their own information, thus providing a way to promote themselves. Entries may be tagged with specific genres and other meta-information. Album release events such as VoMas may also be tracked. The site is designed so that it would be comfortable to use by fans around the world, including both western and Japanese users.
Motivation
Most of the Vocaloid and other voice synth content is in Japanese and distributed across the web. Finding information about a specific artist may be difficult, especially if one doesn’t speak Japanese.
Vocaloid music has some unique features. Instead of live singers, the singing vocals are provided by the software, and the role of those vocals is much more important than in conventional music. Most of the music is produced by individual artists, and self-published in doujin fashion. In the past, most of the albums weren’t available on any well-known online stores. Nowadays, Vocaloid albums get uploaded to sites like Amazon, iTunes and Spotify.
Japanese artists preferred uploading their works to Niconico, but YouTube is better suited for the western community. Thus, popular videos got “reprinted” by fans from NND to YouTube. Nowadays, YouTube gets a lot more traffic among the Japanese community than before and artists use both sites equally.
VocaDB aims to collect all relevant information together and provides external links to official sources, such as the artists’ websites or online stores, so that fans might be able to find music by the artists or genres they’re interested in. Artists could promote themselves by providing links to services where fans can buy their music legally. Fans can also choose whether to view the PV uploaded by the artist himself to NND, or a reprint copied to YouTube. An unlimited number of media can be linked to a single entry. Even if the media is deleted from the original source (YouTube or NND), the entry remains on VocaDB and in users’ collections.
Key features
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Open source. Code is freely available on Github.
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All features are free to use and the site contains no advertisements. Basic features are usable without an account.
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High-performance search engine based on a relational database, scaling to tens of thousands of entries, with varied query options.
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Easy to use, collaborative content editing with versioning and checking for duplicates. Wiki contribution model, yet completely structured information. Anyone can correct information and report errors.
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External APIs. Easy to programmatically download metadata such as title translations, or list of artists or albums for a song.
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Navigation based on comprehensive, typed references. All key information such as artists, albums, songs, PVs is typed. Users can easily discover content related to a specific artist. Tags can be used to provide genres.
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Community features such as comments, song lists and ratings. Registered users can catalogue their album collection.
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Artists are able to control their own content on the site. The site should contain nothing illegal, but if the rightful owner of the content wants his/her information removed or altered, such requests can be approved. All direct download links are forbidden as the site is meant to be completely legal.
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Site is internationalizable and localizable, meaning the user interface can be translated into multiple languages. Registered users can customize display options for translations and formatting. Currently, a majority of the user interface has been translated into Chinese, Finnish, German, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.
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Integration with multiple popular media streaming services, including Bandcamp, Bilibili, Niconico, Piapro, SoundCloud, Vimeo and YouTube, with the possibility to add more.
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VocaDB’s embeddable player can be used on any website, just like you’d embed YouTube or NND. With VocaDB’s embeddable player, you’ll get translations for song title and artist name, and the user can switch between video services. There’s also a link to VocaDB for additional information. The embeddable player even supports OEmbed.
Core attributes
In the order of importance.
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Accessibility: the website needs to be quick and easy to browse. Finding relevant information must be as easy as possible. The website is intended to be usable internationally and in many languages. This includes usability for the editors: it should be as easy as possible to reference entries and check for duplicates.
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Reliability: the information presented should be as correct as possible. Sources/references are required for all non-trivial information, so that the information can be verified.
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Completeness: the information should be as complete and accurate as possible. This means having entries for all relevant Vocaloid songs, albums and artists with detailed information.
History
Development of VocaDB started in late 2010, albeit in a very different form from now, as it was only meant for tracking songs and their appearances at the weekly Vocaloid rankings on Niconico. Later, artist information was also added, including translations and circles. In the middle of 2011, the site was refactored into a community editable wiki-like database.
The official open beta was announced on 31.10.2011 on the now defunct original MikuDB. Since then, the site has not changed fundamentally, but new features keep being added when possible.
Comparison with other similar services
VocaDB is a custom site, developed from scratch for Vocaloid (and related technologies and tools such as UTAU) discography in mind. This has allowed us to provide the best possible user experience for both content editors and fans browsing the site.
Whether you’re trying to find a specific album or discover new music, we try to make that as effortless as possible with the comprehensive search options. Keep track of your album collection and favorite songs, regardless of how and where those were published. High usability extends to adding content to the database: for example, when registering a song from Niconico, often it’s simply enough to input the URL of the video, and the creator, title, vocalists and tags of the song will be associated automatically (when possible). The database will also be scanned for the song being added, to avoid duplicates. No need to edit markup when adding albums, artists or songs; only fill the minimal amount of form fields.
VocaDB does not aim to cover everything related to Vocaloid. We focus on the musical content: music artists, albums and songs. News reporting, lengthy artist descriptions and fanart are better left for general blogs, wikis and image galleries. VocaDB is supposed to be the starting point when finding or discovering a particular album or song, linking to other sites for more in-depth information.
Statistics
Currently (August 2024), the database contains over 107 000 artist entries, 26 000 album entries and 600 000 song entries. Roughly half of those are considered as “finished”. More statistics can be found here.