Beginner's Guide: Starting a Search - mn7216/VocaDBstuff GitHub Wiki

Okay, after you've found a producer whose songs you want to search for, there's a general hierarchy of steps you can take:

1. Identify the songs

It's difficult to find the songs when you don't know what you're looking for. The most important things to find are usually the song's NND sm/nm ID, the song's title, and a vocarank clip of the song. The vocarank clip does provide both the title and ID of the song, but they're difficult to find without having leads beforehand.

The ID is by far the most important out of all the leads you can find. Having it allows you to use more resources (for example nicolog)

You can find the id of a song in a few different ways. Someone should know at least a little bit about the lost song(s) since we're at least aware that they exist, and we usually the id based off what information we have.

  1. We can search using the title. Search on VocaDB, Google, and NND first. Try doing this using the song's full original title (including anything in brackets, like "γ‚ͺγƒͺγ‚ΈγƒŠγƒ«ζ›²". Including the full title with bracketed stuff will usually provide more accurate results. Another useful tip is to use quotes around your search. Using quotes will only give you results that match exactly with what you searched. A good deal of songs also have similar or exactly the same names as other songs, so make sure what you find is actually the song you're looking for.

  2. If we know the publish date (or general time frame) we can check vocaranks. This is much more time consuming and usually requires you being comfortable with navigating the vocaloid rankings wiki. (I plan to host a translated version at some point though)

2. Searching

Searching for the song heavily depends on what info you were able to find in step 1. If you have an sm ID, I typically do the following process:

(This uses my script at https://github.com/mn7216/Vocalost. You can find the installation instructions at the link.)

  1. Navigate to the video. If you only have the ID, you can just put it at the end of the link "https://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/". (For example, https://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm7514653) You'll probably be greeted with a page with a little TV in the middle and some Japanese text under it. If you have my script, you should see a menu button on the middle right of your screen.
  2. Open the menu, and use the options! I start with Nicolog. Optionally, you can use my Nicolog translation if you don't feel comfortable with Japanese. If Nicolog has archived the song, you should see something that looks similar to this: image Make sure to compare the song's title from nicolog and the title we know of (if you have it)!

Here's my general workflow:

graph TD
    A[SM ID] --> D
    B[Video Title] --> D
    C[Vocarank Clip] --> D[Nicolog]
    C --> O[Upload it!]
    D --> E[VocaDB]
    E --> F[Hatena]
    F --> G[Nicopedia]
    G --> H[Archive.org]
    H --> I{Found?}
    I -->|Yes| J[Done]
    I -->|No| K[Search Tab]
    K --> L[Google]
    L --> M[NND]
    M --> N[Openlists]

After finding a song, refer to this page. If you weren't able to find a song using any of these methods, refer to this page (coming soon).