About The Archive

Hey, Holli here! I began the archive in early 2022 on a whim. I saw a post from the hourly vocal synth bot on twitter that mentioned a NIAONiao voicebank and got curious. I'd never heard of the engine before and I've always liked messing with the more obscure vocal synths so it seemed right up my alley to go looking for this one. While Finding it wasn't particularly difficult, downloading any of the voices was a challenge. Most voicebanks for NIAONiao were hosted on Baidu Netdisk, essentially the Chinese equivilent to Google Drive. Problem being, Baidu requires you to have a Chinese phone number to make an account and you need an account to download anything. 

Cut to me bawling my eyes out because I had already gotten my heart set on trying out this little baby, Hua Mo Jin. Her face was so precious I just wanted to know what she sounded like, but her demo had already been deleted and I didn't have a Baidu account to download her with. I was frantically trying to get help from anyone familiar with Baidu to at the very least get my hands on Mo Jin. Eventually, someone on twitter reached out to me saying they had a method of getting a Baidu account that worked for them. Another roadblock? I didn't have an iPhone and this was apparently an iPhone exclusive solution. Long story short, I gave this stranger on twitter my phone number so they could do it for me. Kids do not follow my lead here, please do NOT give your phone number to strangers on the internet. Just because it worked out for me, does not mean it's safe or recommended. In the end though, I did get a Baidu account thanks to this interaction and I will forever be grateful to the person that helped me with it. Because I had such a horrible time trying to get access to these voicebank, I decided I'd dedicate some of my time to archiving all of the ones I could so that they would be more accessible to people outside of mainland China and so that they would not become lost media. All this just because Hua Mo Jin's official art was too cute. 

Since then, I've met some really wonderful people and fostered a community around this engine that was already 6-feet in the ground when I found out about it. The official NIAONiao website is gone, only accessible through the Wayback Machine thanks to common crawls. Dsound has moved on to other things, AISingers is hanging on by a thread. But we're still here, still loving this stupid, broken little software. I like to think I've made a difference, no matter how small. I hope this community can keep growing and that new fans will continue to make voicebanks for NIAONiao. I hope that there can be more exchange between Chinese and English speaking fans. I hope NIAONiao can keep bringing people joy for as long as possible. 

Thank you for following the archive, from the bottom of my heart. 

-Holli (HilliBilliBob)