I’ve been fortunate so far with Miku Hatsune and her ilk. The Vocaloid engine has not yet been ported to Macintosh, so I haven’t been tempted to spend all my evenings and weekends tinkering with vocal synthesizers. But my luck may have run out. There is now a Mac version of UTAU, the freeware/shareware counterpart of Vocaloid. If it’s possible for someone without Japanese to figure out — there is an English-language UTAU community online, so help is available — what free time I had this summer is gone.
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Apparently the Madoka soundtracks will be available only as part of the Japanese BD editions. That presents a problem for those of us who can’t spare $70, or $87.99, for a half-hour of music.
Fortunately, the sheet-music people are on the case. Here’s a nice piano arrangement of “Sis Puella Magica!”, and there are other Madoka arrangements here (third and fourth from the bottom) and here. I hope to see more soon. Update: here’s another.
Update: This is seriously creepy.
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Frëd has been watching Ghost in the Shell: Innocence, or at least the opening.
There’s a good chance that Madoka could go the Kara no Kyoukai and Working!! routes in that both eventually got a standalone release. It also helps that the first vol. of the OST is about 30 mins long, leaving plenty of time to spare so that they can put into one single CD.
Wishful thinking? Maybe!