, or simply Crypton, is a Japanese media company based in Sapporo, Japan. It develops, imports, and sells products for music, such as sound generator software, sampling CDs and DVDs, and sound effect and background music libraries. The companian also provides services of online shopping, online community, and mobile content.
Overview
Crypton started business importing audio products in 1995, and has been involved in the development, import, and sales of sampling CDs and DVDs, sound effect and background music libraries, and musical synthesizer applications. Its main business partners in Japan include musical instrument shops, computer stores, and software distributors.
The company has licensed software to the following organizations: Video game publishers, such as Konami, Sega, Sony Interactive Entertainment, Bandai Namco Entertainment, and Nintendo Public and private broadcasting media (TV, radio, and cable), such as NHK Computer software and hardware companies, such as Apple Inc., Dell, and Microsoft Musical instrument makers, such as Roland Corporation and Yamaha Corporation Public institutions, such as local governments, the Ministry of Defense, and the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Educational institutions, such as high schools, universities, and vocational schools
Crypton also operates a number of Japanese mobile websites, mainly for i-mode of NTT docomo, EZweb of au by KDDI, and Yahoo! Keitai of SoftBank Mobile, to distribute ringtones, sound effects, and voice ringtones (chaku-voice), including: Hatsune Miku Mobile Pocket Sound Effect Pro Mazeteyo Nama Voice
Crypton imports products from more than 50 international suppliers based in Austria, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Russia, South Africa, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
In 2010, Crypton Future Media were announced as the No. 1 company for sound-related software, bringing a share of 21.4% of the market for their related product.
Vocaloid products and services
Crypton is best known for production and sales of speech synthesis software for computer music. Its products use the Vocaloid singing synthesis engine developed by Yamaha Corporation; they were also charged with finding and contacting English studios in order to gain recommendations for the English version of the Vocaloid software. The company released Meiko in 2004 and Kaito in 2006, who were originally developed by Yamaha leaving the commercial release to Crypton Future Media. The company then released the first Vocaloid developed by them, and member of the official Character Vocal Series, Hatsune Miku, which used the upgraded engine Vocaloid 2. The success of the Hatsune Miku Voicebank in Japan (and later in other countries) greatly raised Crypton's profile. The second Character Vocal Series are Kagamine Rin and Len and the third Megurine Luka. Because the popularity of these Vocaloids grew, Crypton launched the website Piapro to upload fan-made content and its own music label KarenT to sell Vocaloid songs.
On 31 August 2019, it was confirmed that Crypton ceased releasing new Vocaloid products on Yamaha's synthesis engine and Cubase editor. Instead, they will release new "Vocaloid" products on their newly-developed Piapro Studio engine-editor with the name NT (New Type) once Crypton has removed compatibility with the Cubase editor for their speech synthesis products.
Vocaloid products
Kaito was the only one sold using the Vocaloid 1.1 engine; the previous Vocaloids before him were sold as Vocaloid 1.0, which he was also supplied with. However, he needed the additional Vocaloid 1.1.2 patch to work on the Vocaloid 1.0 engine. A patch was later released to update all Vocaloid engines to Vocaloid 1.1.2, adding new features to the software, although there were differences between the output results of the engine. Even though Kaito and Meiko were Japanese and sung using Japanese phonetics, the main interface was written using English for both English and Japanese Vocaloids.
