VocaDB's history

Prototype

The prototype of the site was called “Vocaloid poll and database service”, or “VocaVoter”, and it was intended as a site for voting on people’s favorite Vocaloid songs. The website would automatically add songs from the weekly Vocaloid ranking articles from the Vocaloidism blog, and create a poll for voting on that week’s rankings. That idea never caught much interest so it was later dropped. Instead, in addition to song entries that were already there, artist and album entries were added as well and the site became a discography database.

The VocaVoter web frontend was implemented with ASP.NET Web Forms, but when the site was rebranded into VocaDB, the frontend side was rewritten with ASP.NET MVC. Many of the backend (domain model) classes and SQL database tables remained during that transition. The old VocaVoter source code is preserved for archival purposes on GitHub.

See more pictures of VocaDB’s history here.

Inspiration

VocaDB was inspired by similar music databases, mainly VGMdb, Discogs, MusicBrainz and The Metal Archives. Certain features and rules on VocaDB have been inspired by or taken with some modification from other websites.

• Title translations: VGMdb
• Tag voting: Amazon

Important early dates

• 08.12.2010: first commits to version control (private SVN)
• 13.01.2011: first songs added by parsing weekly Vocaloid rankings from Vocaloidism.
• Early 2011: VocaVoter was expanded with artist listing. Songs and artists were added directly to SQL database or imported from the weekly rankings. There was no edit UI. VocaVoter acted as a database for MikuBot IRC bot.
• 16.08.2011: web frontend reworked. The site was now recreated as VocaDB Vocaloid Database.
• 31.10.2011: public announcement of collaboration with MikuDB. The site was introduced on MikuDB and officially entered public beta. Tens of users registered and hundreds of songs were added in just a few days. The first proper admin features were added. Entry submission forms were also added at this time. Even if the site had been available for a while already, this is when it all really started.