#make a cv utau. do it now. do it NOW

[bmpmp3]

I KNOW every person says this about every medium, art form, hobby, etc. ever, and always specifically about whatever time they get really really really into said hobby BUT i do genuinely think, at least from a software perspective, that we're probably on the cusp of some kind of vocal synth renaissance. the scene never died or even wavered, but with the sheer amount of new software coming out both paid and free, voicevox getting a singing update,stuff like OpenUtau making compatibility easier... i don't care for subscriptions so im only interested in their perpetual licenses but i will admit voisona's subscription model for voicebanks has a lot of benefits for those who just wanna use a voice maybe once or twice.... there are so many robots to make sing you guys. there are so many.

[youkah]

I guess tumblr hates me uploading videos now. whatever. anyway I'm not sure about revisiting my utau I go back and forth because like. first of all I recorded her 3 years ago while recovering from covid. second I can still hit the range I recorded her in even though my voice has slightly dropped after T but I this was as powerful as I could go I strained so hard to record her. and third of all this was my first ever vcv bank (technically second bc I fucked up my first round of recordings) and to this day the otoing process is STILL scary... been making utaus since 2013 and cv is still my only friend. sighs.

anyway the american accent/slight texan/southern twang is super embarrassing especially the w and r pronunciation. with the w I can do it much better now, but I am literally unable to roll my r's and it's not a matter of practice I'm one of the few lucky people who's physically incapable so I'm kinda stuck on that... sniffles. I definitely do wanna try to at least save her somewhat... or at the very least before my balls drop fully record one last vanilla voice bank for her before I release her Butch Append

this is her btw her name is hotaru I made her when I was 11 she grew up with me (this art is from 2022 I need to draw her again...)

[keitaiware]

📁 Interview 004: "Voicebank configuration on MacOS." ft. chevrefee

Today's topic is something we've covered on this blog before in my voicebank configuration tutorial series! In my tutorial series we go over the basics of configuring your first CV-VV voicebank on MacOS. After practicing the fundamentals, you can explore other configuration types for UTAU. Our guest with us today is Chevrefee who specializes in C+V English voice banks! There are many ways to record an English voicebank. This format is more compact than the standard VCCV English configuration, which is daunting for most users. If you are interested in configuring an English UTAU, Chevrefee has a detailed tutorial on their C+V method, I will link that below if you would like to read more about it.

Q. To start off this interview, please introduce yourself and your work!

Chev: With pleasure, I'm Chevrefee, an animator and creator for UTAUs Ceta and Veria! People might know me best for my C+V English voicebanks and tutorial, since I've been dedicating a lot of time to promote the format.

Your materials on C+V English are incredible! I have watched through your tutorial on it and would love to make a voicebank some day! In today's interview, we will be discussing this subject more.

Q. For our first question, how long have you been doing UTAU for?

Chev: Thank you for your enthusiasm!! I've only been doing UTAU for only a little more than a year, but I have been using other vocal synthesizers for 2 years at this point!

Ah really? That's really impressive as you know so much already!! UTAU is a very expansive format as its very customizable.

Q. What other synthesizers do you have experience in?

Chev: I mostly used Synthesizer V prior to using UTAU! I loved creating designs for the mascot-less voicebanks and I realized that I loved that customizable aspect of it, so moving on to creating UTAUs was somewhat expected.

Ah! I went through your website and was looking through your SynthesizerV designs, I love them so much!! It's nice having a face to attach to the character's voice, my favorite out of them would be Ryo as I love characters with glasses.

Q. Returning UTAU, before we discuss anything on voicebank creation, I am curious to hear what your workflow on MacOS is like! I want to share the process with the audience so its not from my own experience.

Chev: I exclusively use OpenUTAU, RecStar and VLabeler for my UTAU works! I record the samples on my iOS Recstar and a USB microphone, oto in VLabeler and tune in OpenUTAU ( sometimes doing both at the same time ), and then I move on to Adobe Audition to mix and bring it all together! Seems like an odd choice for a DAW (since its barely one) but I mainly use Audition for its compatibility with other Adobe software, since I also create my MVs there! I also use Audition to clean my samples since there's a batch processing option.

Its so cool hearing someone take advantage of UTAU mainly on MacOS that's not me! I'm pretty much the same except I do most of my OTOing inside of UTAU-Synth! Can't break the habit as I've been working in there for 7 years now. OpenUTAU, VLabeler, and Recstar changed everything on MacOS when they released. We finally had proper applications for bank creation. So I feel like as someone on MacOS you got into UTAU in the golden era! (haha) I've got a few friends who use Adobe Audition, and I've used it once myself! Couldn't exactly navigate it well, but my friends who do use it make it look like a piece of cake. There are no batch export options for Garageband, and for UTAU, batch exporting is a very crucial feature.

Q. For our next question in bank creation, what are your recommendations for beginners in terms of recording and hardware?

Chev: I feel the same way! I feel really lucky that I got into UTAU when its at its most accessible for MacOS users, especially since I upgraded to a Mac Silicon device and lost access to Windows Bootcamp. For beginners I would recommend familiarizing using RecStar! I would suggest using the iOS or Android version of it especially if the user is recording in their bedroom space. I found that using a phone helps manage the space better when I stuff myself into a closet to record ( classic UTAU experience ). I think users should prioritize their comfort first when they record for a first time - Just relax, drink enough water before and during recording, and record something that's within comfortable talking or singing range. I would recommend recording a Japanese CV just to learn the ropes of UTAU recording! For hardware, I recommend podcast mics for a very budget friendly option! I use a Maono AU-PM360TR Condenser Mic to record all my voicebanks. I found that the usual recommended mics for UTAU ( namely the Blue Yeti ) can be way out of budget for a lot of people, especially in Southeast Asia (where I come from). I think a budget podcast mic is very much usable and can stand up against other more expensive microphones! I would also suggest having a pop filter to tame all those little nasty plosives. ( I DIY-ed mine with a sock and hangers! ) If users have access to a recording studio (perhaps a bookable mini studio from their college/university) I would also highly recommend using those resources as they usually have better equipment that's free to use.

Its really unfortunate the loss of features with every update. In my previous interview we discussed alternatives to Windows Bootcamp for MacOS Silicon devices! I would record on Recstar using my iPad… I will take note of this for myself! For beginner configuration, I made a complete tutorial series for getting started with your first JP CV-VV voicebank. That will be linked here.

Voicebank Configuration Series. . .

https://keitaiware.com/post/763148617255092224/macos-utau-voicebank-configuration-series

What my tutorials did not have were thorough hardware recommendations. I do not own a studio mic and record my voicebanks on a pair of Apple auxiliary earbuds. So these were very good recommendations! Outside of the UTAU scene, I have heard many topics on the Blue Yeti being difficult for beginners to use as well. I had asked my friend who is fascinated with audio engineering about mics before, and has recommended XLR mics. So I did mention those, but you would need an external audio interface to route them to your computer, which means, you cannot use them with Recstar. So the mic recommendation you gave is very appreciated! DIY pop filter sounds like a nice way to save money! Socks and a wire coat hanger would do very nicely, anything to absorb the sound before the mic. I do believe I mentioned renting a recording space too! If you live near a rentable recording space I highly recommend that as well.

Q. For our next question, how did you discover C+V and go about making your C+V English tutorial?

Chev: Earbuds!! I wasn't aware of the Blue Yeti's difficulty especially with the external audio interface. Glad I avoided buying that for my first mic… The way I discovered C+V is honestly somewhat funny - I actually discovered it in an oto commission list! At that time I was planning my second voicebank, Veria, and I looked around to see who I could commission for her oto. My frequent oto-er and current collaborator for my C+V English projects, Biggity Boy, had C+V English listed as one of the available formats he could oto. I tried to find any sort of info on the format but all I could find was an entry in the UTAU wiki that basically said "This is a joke format." with no reclist or anything. So I was like 'well that's kind of interesting.' The problem with English UTAU voicebanks to me was always the immense workload that comes with creating it, and I took a wild guess and expected C+V English to be the easiest way to record and English voicebank. I asked Biggity for the reclist and oto, and it all started from there! It's hard to imagine that all of my work wouldn't happen if I didn't take a look at Biggity's commissions list. Veria's beta tests were seen by a lot more people than I expected, and I held a poll asking if people wanted a tutorial for creating C+V English voicebanks. The poll ended with an overwhelming positive response, so I sought out to create the tutorial! An extensive tutorial was very much needed apart from the usual UTAU recording and otoing tutorial since prior to Cadlaxa's involvement with the dedicated phonemizer, C+V English relied on the EN ARPA phonemizer, and users needed to jump through extra optimization to use the voicebanks. 3 Months and tons of contributors and beta testers later, the tutorial has since been regularly updated with user feedback, and a refined tutorial via the upcoming website is being worked on! None of this could've happened without the hard work of contributors.

I remember looking into C+V after discovering your work, I do believe the wiki said that at the time of me reading it as well! Since your work on C+V English, I believe the reputation of the configuration has evolved completely since Veria's release. The Shelter cover (Link), showcasing Veria's voice left a long lasting impression on me! When it comes to resources in the UTAU community, they always catch my eye. This is souly because at the time when I started 7 years ago, there were no resources for MacOS and it lead to me frequenting the UTAforum. I started getting back into UTAU, with two other friends about two years ago? But one of those friends was a Mac user as well, and he was struggling to find resources. That's what lead up to me launching this blog! Your tutorials were very well put together, as I have not dabbled into video format, but aside from being insightful it was very fun to watch! Its absolutely brilliant. This being said, I hope more people are inspired to share what the create and know by seeing creatives like yourself!

Chev: I'm very aware of your work!! The Keitaiware blog is such a vital resource for MacOS users, especially for UTAU-Synth users! Just yesterday I sent an entry from your blog to someone trying to troubleshoot a problem with UTAU-Synth since I wasn't well versed at all with it. Truly it is my go-to resource when I need to troubleshoot the software. And thank you!! The video is more of a way to get more eyes on the written tutorial than anything, but I'm glad people enjoyed my editing :D

Q. To finish up this interview, do you have any future plans with your vocal synth work?

Chev: I have a lot in my cards at the moment with vocal synth work, but I'm currently finishing up work on a voicebank I recorded a year ago when I got an illness that made my voice drop into a Tenor male range!! Here's a preview of his work in progress artwork and voice.

I'm also heavily involved with IDN100%, a group that specializes in Indonesian UTAU synthesis, and we are working hard for our 2025 release!!

How exciting!! The project is looking super professional so far, I am rooting for the team to meet their deadlines!! I haven't seen many UTAUs with a knight motif, the armor is very well drawn! If you don't mind sharing some details, what is his name?

Chev: I'm thinking of sticking with Nisegane Julian, (偽金 ジュリアン ) - Nisegane being fake or fools gold, since I'm planning on this character to like flaunting and be full of himself while being a coward. I'm so glad you heard of IDN100%, thank you for your support!

Nisegane Julian is such a clever name.. fools gold to reflect his vain personality, I love that! I can't wait to see your current projects come to fruition Chev, these are very exciting! That concludes our interview for today, if you would like to see more of Chevrefee's work, C+V English tutorials, and are interested in the IDN100% project. All materials will be linked below. Thank you for sharing your time with the KEITAIWARE project today!

Bsky: https://bsky.app/profile/chevrefee.bsky.social Chevrefee’s Resources: https://chevrefee.wordpress.com/ C+V English Tutorial: https://youtube.com/watch?v=jeDmqo0wwkU&ab_channel=chevrefee IDN 100%: https://twitter.com/UTAU_IDN100

[davekat-sucks]

people are so shitty, you know the girl who voices Emira Blight in the owl house? yeah well she had to delete her twitter and instagram because she was getting harassed after telling people nicey not to use her voice for ai things, people need to learn how to respect boundaries if someone doesn’t want their voice use for ai stuff respect it, ai is shit anyways like who actually uses it? anything you tell an ai it steals it and posts it on the internet, idc if it’s for art or a fanfic, ai is shit and it steals things you tell it, like if you told an ai your home address it would post it everywhere on the internet

I saw it on Twitter, yeah. I feel bad for her. She lost her husband to cancer and now this. I don't know if the AI cover was monetized or not and worry that doxxing may have been involved somewhere in this, just please respect the voice actress's wishes. I don't mind if people can continue to use or make AI cover, just don't make it public. People may compare the AI covers to something like UTAU. But the difference is that with UTAU, it's a rule and courtesy to NOT give out the voicebank that is involved with a copyrighted character or real life singer. The process of making a VB too is different. It has more manual steps involving having to make individual phonetic syllabaries for whatever language voicebank one is making (CV, CVVC, VCCV English, etc). Cutting down the audio track to get that right phonic and manually tuning it to make it sound tolerable as a Jinriki UTAU.

A reason why UTAU hasn't boomed like before is that there is a lot more effort and time to make it compared to AI, which has a in-coding program compile and separate the audio for you to make it sing. Compared to UTAU, Vocaloid, or other vocal synthesizers that has you manually make the lyrics, tuning, and timing to make your VB sing. There are even real life artists that do use vocal synthesizers as well as shown here:

Overall, I hope she gets well and fuck people who acted harshly on her. If you wanna continue making AI covers of whatever character she voices, at least do it in private circles or keep to yourself. Don't monetize the covers.

[balzabul]

original song by powapowa-p, ust by chasing fireflies

Been toying with the idea of making an HD rerelease of Ouji, and possibly doing a CV->VCV conversion, but the thought of all the work has been putting me off it LOL. For now I've cleaned up all his samples and removed excess noise, as well as given his oto a modern once-over. Can't help the accent! lmao

[nihiliumwave]

Quick Update Post

Hello. This is a quick Update Post.

We are updating our Readme Files.

Chance Reclist will release with a base oto.ini once some test USTs and C- phonemes are finished.

There will be an OpenUTAU dictionary for Chance Reclist. Heccan will recieve a dedicated dictionary as well.

OpenUTAU templates will be provided.

Our Early Access Website was Updated.

We are working on our own Wiki to have a safe place to store in an organized manner all the details that are needed for the characters and voicebanks, as well as other projects.

AC [Roulette] was released for Early Access.

Demo material for our current voicebanks should release (hopefully) soon.

A new voicebank, Caché Völatta is in development, along other voices.

Details about the new voicebank(s) below the Read More.

Caché Völatta

This voicebank is currently in Alpha testing, ver. 1.0. Beta releases will include romaji compatibility and 4 different appends. The voicebank will include two different releases for classic UTAU and OpenUTAU instead of our classical port-only.

He will recieve a dedicated website, but his data will be provided in our main website as well.

Features provided as of current development stage:

CV Japanese + extras (Rolled R, english L, etc)

A soft calm voice with 3 pitches

4 Appends to add expression: SRAM (Solid), LRU (Power), ROM (Growl/Guttural), USB (Warm)

A folder of 40+ extra sounds, including breaths made for singing.

Dedicated Artwork and Portraits for each append.

Romaji compatibility.

Template for OpenUTAU.

OpenUTAU COLORS feature compatibility.

More details in the official Wiki Page.

Morpho Morphae

The partner voice for Caché. This voicebank will be recorded soon and will have the same procedure as Caché Völatta, meaning it will have dedicated development time.

As for now, the plans for the voicebank is as follows:

CV Japanese + extras

Energic voice, 3 pitches. Might be Powerscale due to the characteristics of the voice.

Appends (Cute, Annoyed, Growl, Power)

A folder of extra sounds.

Dedicated Artwork.

Romaji compatibility.

OpenUTAU template + COLORS feature compatiblity.

Due to the voice provider being one single body, it might be hard to make both voices sound different enough from each other, but we will do our best work, since our goal is to make them be used together as well as separate.

Just like Caché, Morpho will also recieve a dedicated OpenUTAU release. In both singers, the OpenUTAU oto.ini could be different, due to how the program manages the overlaps sometimes.

We highly advice to not use the classic UTAU voice release on OpenUTAU, and viceversa.

As we have experienced certain personal problems, development might be slow, specially regarding art. For such reasons, we will get the focus on Caché, then focus on Morpho.

That is everything for today.

Thank you for reading.

[utau-bowl]

Paradise ~FLORESCERE~ Review

Hello everyone! I’ve taken a huge break from reviews since I’ve been focusing on myself and bettering my own life, hope the suspense wasn’t too much.  This voicebank also took a long time for me to formulate my thoughts on, since there’s so much in it. There’s also four(4) requests in the askbox right now, which could give me review material for months! This review was requested by an anonymous user. 

*Art by Annuntium

Hear a Sample of Paradise

Bio

Name: Paradise (パラダイス) - Enomoto Paju (榎本パジュ) Age: 18 Height: 6'0 (183 cm) Weight: 161 lbs (73 kg)

An affluent, eloquent idol who's also extremely charming. Although very rich, Paradise still does his best to remain kind and humble. He is also cousins with Orchid. He sings with a warm, husky toned voice. Paradise is a part of World’s End, an UTAU idol group with 11 current members.

Official Site

Paradise has a toyhou.se page and an UTAU wiki page - the UTAU wiki one is the one with his actual download. He is 378 MB when unzipped and has fully generated frq and pmk files.

First Impressions

Paradise’s voice is like a caramel covered melon with those sour sugar crystals on it- it has an edge to it but isn’t without this underlying gentleness. If  Annuntium was the one who requested this, you seriously nailed the voice acting. Not even I can do it that consistently for 4 pitches! He is a little androgynous, but I personally like it and I think it fits the character.

Configuration

Paradise is recorded at F#3, A3, and D4, with an extra falsetto pitch at C5 (and I do mean extra, it’s isn’t even included in the prefix.map by default!) The usual extras like glottal stops and end breaths are there, but he also has English Rs and Ls.

The readme recommends adding g flags to him, but I don’t think he needs it. He sounds boyish enough.

The one thing holding Paradise back is that his samples are extremely quiet. The high pitch is meant to be powerful, but often ends up with tons of artifacts from UTAU’s resampler, weakening it. Paradise is very tricky to make sound good with any resampler outside of doppeltler, anything else either makes him downright grainy or bawl like a shrieking gremlin. The lowest pitch is especially quiet, which makes it downright unusable outside of its small niche. Despite being recorded at F#3, it doesn’t actually kick in until you go as far down as A2, almost a whole octave lower. This is also kind of a nitpick but the V CV parts have a bit too much cutoff a lot of the time, as in, the sample seems to cut off too early? It’s not an issue 95% of the time, but in fast songs, that sort of thing can be really annoying to work around.

My recommended flags: B10

My recommended resamplers: doppeltler

Final Thoughts

Paradise is a very well rounded and great bank - especially for one that’s only the voice actor’s third attempt at an UTAU! I would really recommend to any UTAU user, especially an experienced one. Also follow annuntium right now

Got any other UTAUs you want me to review? Send an ask!

[skautism]

how hard is it to make an english synth? are ai voice overs the same?

i am not sure about AI type stuff but say you’re recording your own utau synth

the only viable eng synth you can make in utau is cvvc, short for consonant vowel vowel consonant, this is related to how samples are recorded

for a cv (consonant vowel) jp utau, you only need to record sounds like “a” “ka” “wa” “ma” “na” “ya” “ra” “ta” “sa” etc

for a cvvc you need to record vowel and consonant blending into each other, i deadass can’t explain it because i don’t know how it works, so i’ll explain cvc since it’s the in between of these two

cvc - consonant vowel consonant

using jp banks as an example, you would record the typical cv sounds, plus sounds like “a” and “e” blending into each other, “a” and “ta” blending, etc. if you open the raw vocal samples of an utau like kasane teto cvc when you download her, you can hear this!

the REASON the only bank you can really do for eng is cvvc is because english just has so many more goddamn sounds in general compared to jp. jp is a phonetic language, basically the romanized written words are what you see is what you get, as long as you know what the phonetic pronunciation is for the language. utau is pronounced how it looks (putting it into eng looking phonetics: ootow [pronounced like ow/ouch, not tow a car. this isn’t perfect but it gets the point across lol])

english has several pronunciations just for the letter A. A as in aware, as in trap, as in ball, as in pay. its fucking hellish. so many sounds to blend in. here’s the english dictionary preprogrammed into my (pirated lol) copy of vocaloid4:

now of course, even tho the bare minimum for a jp bank is cv, it’s not as high quality. since vocaloid is a proprietary/licensed program, they have high quality banks that take a lotta effort to record even if it’s in jp

as a fun bonus fact you’d think a cn bank would be harder since it’s a tonal language, but as far as i know, it’s not, it’s the producers responsibility to program in the specific tones to provide the difference between mom and horse

[auspicious-voice]

UTAU Tutorials - How To Use USTs

Having discussed what USTs are and having installed some voicebanks, the next step is to naturally download some USTs and make the voicebanks you installed sing them.

In this tutorial, we’ll talk about how to fit USTs, as well as explaining what resamplers, wavtools, and plugins are and what they do.

Downloading USTs

You don’t really need to install USTs by the way. You just download them and extract them to a folder with file extractor software such as WinRAR. UTAU doesn’t have a dedicated UST folder, so I recommend making a folder within its root directory where you can put USTs into.

You can look up “UTAU UST download” and see what kind of USTs you can use.

Fitting USTs

Keep in mind that most USTs can come in many formats, such as Japanese CV or VCV, or in other languages. Depending on the voicebank you are using, you might want to use the appropriate voicebank so it can read the UST correctly.

Loading USTs

There are two ways to load a UST in UTAU:

Double-clicking the UST file

Opening and loading the UST file within UTAU

Once the voicebank is loaded, there might be a chance that the screen pops up as this:

The text may display in red because the required voicebank, resampler, or wavtool is missing.

Just pick whatever voicebank, resampler, and wavtool you currently have, and click OK to properly load the UST.

What are Resamplers and Wavtools?

The Tool 1 (append) is the wavtool, which specializes in stringing the rendered notes, and the Tool 2 (resample) is the resampler, which specializes in synthesizing the selected notes.

It should be worth noting that the default resampler and wavtool included with the installation of UTAU may not be a one-size-fits-all, and this depends on the voicebank’s quality. If that is the case, then I recommend that you look around and find other wavtools and resamplers that help make the voicebank that you’re using sound better.

Converting USTs

When converting USTs, you might want to consider the following:

The encoding of the voicebank (Romaji? Hiragana?)

The encoding and format of the UST (Romaji? Hiragana? CV? VCV?)

This usually applies to Japanese USTs. USTs in other languages is another topic I’d like to get into in the future.

Plug-ins and How to Use Them

Plug-ins are used in UTAU to make things a bit easier for you. To get iroiro2, download the plug-in we need here, and since most plug-ins come in archives, extract it to the plugins folder included in the UTAU root directory.

If you still have UTAU open, go to Tools(T) > Plug-Ins(N) > Reload(R) to reload the list of plugins. Go to the plugins option again and select the iroiro2 plugin. Depending on the plug-in name, it may show up as Japanese, so to change the language to English, go to Settings and click on the last checkbox. Close the plugin afterwards.

Since we are going to fit the UST, press Ctrl+A to select the entire UST, click on the iroiro2 plug-in, and the plugin’s name should show up in English with the following interface:

Now depending on what voicebank you’re using and what format the UST is in, the actions shown in the menu and what they do are rather straightforward. Use any of the actions as needed and click OK to make the changes.

Adding The Final Touches

Now that most of the UST is fitted to the voicebank, the last step is to clear any settings that may make the voicebank sound weird.

Again, press Ctrl+A to select the entire UST, right-click on a note and select Region Property.

The Note Properties box contains the settings for all of the notes in a UST. Here’s brief explanation on what the parameters do:

Intensity - the volume of the note.

Modulation - the pitch fluctuation of the note.

Preutterance and Overlap - these settings actually belong to the oto.ini of a voicebank, and aren’t really used that much.

Consonant Velocity (beta) - changes the speed of the consonants in between note transitions.

BRE - the breathiness parameter.

Flags - Other parameters that can alter how the voicebank sounds. See here for a comprehensive list of flags and what they do.

STP - the “starting point” of a note, measured in milliseconds (ms). Not used that much, but can be useful to emphasize transitions.

Clear all of the Flags, BRE, STP, Preutterance, Overlap, and Consonant Velocity (beta). Then, set the Intensity parameter to 100%, and the Modulation parameter to 0%. Click OK, and your UST is fitted. From this point on, you can make the voicebank you selected sing, or make further adjustments to the UST.

[jhupaig]

ok hello! lil tutorial on how to get started with utau stuff with my basic basic knowledge

First thing to get out of the way, you’ll need to change your system locale to Japanese. Here’s a lil tutorial on how. This is what you want to see. 

Reboot your system after that

Next, follow these steps to download Utau. The program itself should be good after that.

Now download Oremo from here. The download should start as soon as the link’s open. If you try opening it after that and get an error, double check that your locale is actually changed. When you open the program, it should be in english, with a list of hiragana on the side.

If you can read hiragana, you can just go on to record from here. but if you can’t or would just rather have romaji, you can copy this reclist into a notepad and save it to the oremo folder, next to the other reclists. You can find a lot of different reclists and save em this way, depending on what you want with the language and bank type. Anyway, you can open it in oremo by going to File > Load Voice List

(sidenote, this site is helpful with pronouncing japanese)

Now you’ll just go down the list and record as it tells you to. By default you should be able to just press ‘r’, and it’ll record as long as you hold it down. Leave a little pause after you press it and before releasing to make sure your sound isn’t cut off. You can listen to playback by pressing space.

It’s recommended to hold the notes for a few seconds, but jazzy just kinda pronounced the syllables short and sweet and it seemed to work fine? So shrugs. Either way though, you’ll want your recordings on the same pitch, and oremo can help with that with Show > Show pitch guide. You can pick a note you want to work with and try to match it.

You can also use the other stuff it has to make sure your recordings are good. > Show F0 tells you how steady your pitch is, >Show Power, shows your power, etc.

Once you’re done, you’ll find your recordings under ‘result’ in your oremo folder (says where it is at the bottom). Copy those, then find the UTAU folder, probably under Program Files. Open that, the voice folder, and then make a new folder in there with your utau’s name and save the recordings in there. You’ll open your voice bank in the utau program now. (Project > Project Property ; Where it says voice bank, if the bank doesn’t show up in the drop down on the first line, click the three dots at the end of the second to find it.)

Now you oto. You can learn to do it yourself with this, or just give your voice file to me cuz I don’t really mind doing it. 

After that, your voice bank is done~ Now you get to find USTs and drag/drop em into the Utau program. (Warning that some USTs could sound weird- That’d be because it was made for a different type of bank. If you used the base reclist or the one I gave, your bank is CV (consonant-vowel), and VCV or VCCV ones won’t work right, cuz it’s trying to read things differently)

fiiiinally, after you got a good UST and rendered your .wav files and all that (Project > Render wav), downloaded your instrumental shit, blah blah, you can throw everything together in audacity to finish a cover. This is a good tutorial to get started on mixing for vocaloid-type stuff. You’ll have to play around and learn more on your own, but just copying what she did got me to a nice starting point.

But uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuh yeah

[ask-dokiswap]

(i like how two to three years ago i tried to make an utau to go along with a fanfiction i was reading

i gave up at trying to record the cvs and vs for them

and now i’m doing the exact same thing other than the fact i just want my baby ECHO to sing donut hole because i can’t :’3 )

[keitaiware]

📁 Section 4, "Generating Frequencies on MacOS."

For this tutorial we will be generating the frequency files on OpenUTAU and UTAU-Synth. Disclaimer, it is recommended to use OpenUTAU for frequency generation, and am only including frequency generation for UTAU-Synth just to archive this information. Before we get started, lets talk about what frequency generation is!

Generating frequencies is the last step to completing your UTAU voicebank, but before we get into frequency generation, what are frequency files? Frequency (.frq) files are the frequency maintained by the program to reference for every render. Without generating the .frq files, the program, or other programs will either generate a strange .frq or crash.

OpenUTAU Frequency Generation . . .

First, we will go to Tools > Singers, and locate the voicebank you wish to generate .frq files for.

Inside the Singer UI, click a sample from the menu and then use cmnd+A to select all samples.

Right-click any highlighted sample, and select, "Regenerate FRQ." From here, you will have 4 different choices of .frq generation. These run different algorithms for frequency generation, the results will vary depending on your voicebank. Right now, I will go ahead and use DIO.

After rendering, it will save .frq files to the selected singer inside of the singer folder.

/Users/User/Library/OpenUtau/Singers

All edited information will be exported here.

UTAU-Synth Frequency Generation . . . *(OUTDATED, only refer to this segment if you are on Legacy MacOS. OpenUTAU is recommended.)

If you used my CV-VV reclist, I have a UST for generating all the frequencies in your voicebank. You can download it below.

Download

Onto manual frequency generation, to generate your frequency files you can make a UST by writing all your samples into the UST like this. (Please add a space in-between samples, this is very time consuming.)

After you complete setting the samples into the UST, let it render once, and all your frequencies should be generated.

Q. How do I replace .frqs ?

A. .frqs can be replaced by going to the UTAU's folder, and searching for the desired .frq file. You can also batch select all .frqs by searching the, ".frq," extension within the UTAU's folder. After this, delete them, and repeat the generation.

In UTAU-Synth, after generating all the frequencies, the program will generate, “.spef,” files, also known as, “specification files.” These files are not necessary, as they are exclusively generated in UTAU-Synth. It's recommended to select all the .spefs and throw them away.

Q. Why do you delete the .spef files ?

A. Since they're exclusive to UTAU-Synth, they will not be read on Windows. So, to save disk space and optimize your bank, deleting them will make the overall size of the folder smaller.

That concludes this segment on frequency generation! As of writing this, I have just found out it is possible to generate .frqs on OpenUTAU. So, I will be making a follow up tutorial on this when I get the chance.

Congratulations! You have completed your first UTAU voicebank!

[dralineee]

UTAU Otoing Tutorial

So this will probably never be read by anyone ever, but I thought, while I still understand this concept I might as well create a post so that when i do forget, I’ve got it written down somewhere.

Note: When referring to the program, UTAU is in capitals, when referring to the voice bank utau, is in lowercase.

What’s an OTO?

For lots of people, an oto is the bane of making an utau, it’s confusing and there doesn’t appear to be any clear idea of what it actually does. But no one wants to read the UTAU user manual. 

But from what I understand, an oto is used by an utau to tell it where for each recording it should start, stop and preserve the sound. 

This is especially important when creating either a VCV or CVVC voice bank as the smoothing effect is achieved by cutting off parts of your recording. This can be done by having a single recording for each syllable (this is how a CV is recorded) however, with more complex voice banks it’s much easier to compress a set of syllables into a single recording. This gives the utau not only a smoother and more consistent sound, but it’s also much easier to record and makes your the number of files in your utau’s folder much smaller.

Do I need an OTO? Hint: probably.

Often in CV utau’s there is no need for an oto as by having a recording for each syllable is enough information for UTAU to create the note for your utau to sing. However, if you’ve recording has a long silence at the beginning, you wobble off key at the end of your recording or you find that your utau, when singing shorter notes, cuts off part of your recording you may want to consider otoing. 

Even if you don’t have any of those problems, I would highly recommend otoing anyway. It will give you slightly more control when your utau is singing.

If you’re making a VCV or CVVC voice bank you will definitely need it. 

Beginning the otoing process

I’ll only be showing how to oto CV and VCV voice banks as they are the only ones I work with.

To begin otoing we will need to go to voice bank settings which is under tools:

This will open a display which will look similar to this:

The recordings you’ve put in your utau’s folder should appear in the Name column. In my case, I’ve just got a,i,u,e,o at two different pitches. 

The next column, Alias, is used to encode your utau and is a fairly straight forward process for CV voice banks. For VCV voice banks aliasing isn’t as easy and I’ll explain my process a little later on.

To begin otoing click on the syllable you want to oto and press ‘Launch editor’.

In the top left corner we can see the name of the file and the alias in speech marks. This is helpful when when otoing VCV when you have multiple syllables in a single recording. 

The blue lines are the SOUND WAVE, you’ll be able to see this if you’re in sound editing software like audacity. 

The orange line is your TUNING. The line in the middle is where your orange line should be approximately. If you find that in your recording the orange line is hugely off the mark or dips really far at random points in the recording, it’s probably a good idea to re-record as it will noticeably affect how your utau will sound. 

The red line is the PREUTTERANCE. This is used to identify where the beginning of the vowel begins or, for VCV, where the beginning of the syllable is. 

The green line is the OVERLAP. This is the area in which will be used to blend the two sounds together.

For now just drag preutterance and overlap lines over into the open, if you continue dragging from the side you will get a pink shaded area and blue shaded area.

The pink shaded area is the CONSONANT. To prevent confusion, I will call this the CLIP. This is the part of the recording that UTAU will not stretch or as I said before, preserve the sound.  

The blue shaded area is the CUT OFF. This is the part of the recording that will be completely ignored by UTAU.

Once you’ve dragged out everything, It should have all these parts.

CV Otoing process

It’s best to start with the CUT OFF as all your values will move with once they’ve been moved out. This should be placed where the sound wave begins, I find it’s nice to just give it a tiny little bit of silence at the beginning.  If you go to the end of the recording you can also drag a cut off area to cut off the end of your recording. If you had the problem where you go off key at the end of your recording, this is where you can fix it. Just cut off the recording just before you orange line starts bending weirdly. But make sure that it’s not too close to the Clip shaded area otherwise UTAU will have noting to stretch! 

Next is the CLIP (pink shaded area), this should cover the consonant and vowel as this is the bit you want to be able to hear clearly. Drag it all the way over till there is a semi consistent thickness in the sound wave in the vowel. 

The RED LINE/PREUTTERNACE should be where the beginning of your vowel is. With vowel recordings like a, i, u, e and o, you’ll want to place it right at the beginning of the sound wave. With syllables like ‘ka’, you’ll want to drag it to where the vowel begins. To identify this, usually there’ll be a bit of a bump in the sound wave where the consonant and usually where then next raise is where the Vowel is. 

 The GREEN LINE/OVERLAP should be placed about half way between the CUT OFF and the PREUTTERANCE.  

Once you’re done it should look something like this:

A good way to test if your oto is working is to get your Utau to sing in progressively shorter intervals for each line of the hirigana alphabet. e.g. ka, ki, ku, ke, ko. e.g.2. ta, chi, tsu, te, to. etc...

Example:

If you’ve correctly oto’ed you should be able to clearly hear each syllable at each interval without it sounding like the end has been chopped off.

CV Aliasing

Aliases are used to encode your utau in hirigana and romaji.

For example: ka.wav = か

At the moment, there is no way to automatically alias all your recordings and it can only be done manually. This can be done quicker if you use the oto.ini file in your utau’s folder.

In this file you should see something along the lines of:

a.wav=,,,,,                          From this you should change it to the following: e.wav=,,,,,                          a.wav=あ,,,,, i.wav,,,,,                             i.wav=い,,,,, o.wav,,,,　　　　　　　　o.wav=お,,,,, u.wav,,,,,                            etc...

If you’ve already oto’d your recordings before aliasing, just put the hirigana character before the commas. e.g. a.wav=あ, 37, 1254, 90, 564, 0.

If your computer won’t let you save in your utau folder (it should but if not) save it somewhere else, but Make sure to save your oto as a .txt file in UTF-8 encoding or else the hirigana will end up as strange symbols. You can change the .txt encoding here when saving:

Once you’ve done that with the syllables, open your new oto in UTAU by going to files.

Find the oto.ini file and your alias should appear like so:

If you had to save your oto elsewhere, make sure you’re searching with files with .txt and not .ini.

VCV Otoing process

With VCV or Vowel-Consonant-Vowel voice banks we want to use the otoing to chop up our recording to get the clips we need. Because there are multiple clips to one recording we’ll need to duplicate it in the oto table. Unlike CV aliasing, UTAU will not recognise the duplicates if you do it directly in the oto.ini file.  Do NOT make duplicates of your recording (.wav) in your utau’s folder. 

To do duplicate, select the .wav file you want and press duplicate.

It is possible to alias in both romaji and hiragana, however it would double your work load so until you’ve aliased fully in one or the other. I wouldn’t recommend aliasing in both.

If you’ve never oto’ed VCV before it can be a bit confusing to understand. But, what we do is use the Vowel from the previous syllable and stick it onto the current syllable. Thus why there’s in the alias it’s [o ヴぉ]. 

I like to duplicate the non-oto’ed version of the recording and Alias it before I actually start the oto. I find if I put each syllable in first and then add the vowel of the previous one it’s a little faster. Make sure to press set every time you put an alias.

When you open up your editor it should look along the lines of this (If you zoom out):

If you don’t know how to read sound waves, we can see how each part breaks up.

So when we oto, we oto it like this:

let’s work with [u va] or [u ヴぁ]! (the second section of this recording)

For the CUT OFF we want to bring it to the beginning “u” sound from the previous “Vu” sound. This is usually around the middle of the “Vu” sound, Or, much like finding the Vowel for CV, where the shape of the Sound wave changes. You can shift the cut off area around and double click on the ‘P’ button in the top left corner next to the + and - buttons, this will playback the current oto of your recording (excluding the Cut off areas).

With the END CUT OFF, you want to Bring it to the end of the “Va” syllable.

With the RED LINE/PREUTTERANCE you want place it at the beginning of your syllable. This will make sure that the syllable “Va” is sung in time rather that being playing “u va” and the “va” sound being heard at the wrong time.

With the GREEN LINE/OVERLAP, again, you want to place it in between the Preutterance and Cut off, however, more often than not you will want to place it closer to the cut off than you would with a CV as it will give more Vowel for UTAU to blend with. 

With the CLIP/PINK SHADED AREA you want to have it cover the previous Vowel and the entire syllable. This will make sure UTAU will use “u va” instead of  “u v-”. As you can see from the example above, this does not mean you need to cover the entire section, where the thickness of the sound wave is consistent is approximately where the vowel is extended. 

Continue this process with the rest of the recording. With the beginning segment of the recording, oto it like you would with a CV recording making sure to cut off the following syllable. An easy way to just go down the list is to use the arrows at the bottom of the editor, this will go up and down the list for you to oto each syllable with out having to exit the editor. 

To check if you’ve oto’ed correctly, you can line up the syllables you’ve just oto’ed. e.g. - vu, u va, a va, a vi etc...

Here I’ve got the recording’s syllables repeated 3 times.

1) 1/4 notes to see if the sound sounds smooth. Make sure you cross fade

2) alternating notes progressively getting higher to test smoothness between notes.

3) 1/8 notes to see if you can clearly hear each syllable. 

Don’t be afraid of the envelope going over the end of the note’s area. This is how the syllables blend together, if the Vowel is cut off for a syllable it will be replaced by the overlap for the one following after. 

If you find that when you add new files to your utau folder while you oto other files, you may find that the new files don’t show up. Don’t panic! Simply refresh by going to File Refresh.

If you have any questions feel free to ask me! 

[reikaniichan]

🎨 favorite color: i like most colors but also purple is a main fave, pretty obviously (i think)

📖 currently reading: i haven’t been reading much tbh. i have some stuff i keep meaning to read tho

🎶 last song: [Machigaune EiZaki A2] Tawagoto Speaker [UTAU COVER Scribble PV] . One of my old utau covers… it’s also where Batsu (oc) comes from. if, one day, i make a new vb for eiki and kazaki (cv probably), i’ll cover it again.

🎬 last movie: i haven’t watched any movies in a couple years now.

📺 last series: i don’t watch shows. my parents have been really into detective/murder mystery shiws though

🍴sweet, savory, spicy: i like sweet and i like savory. i can’t handle spicy too good.

🤤 craving: food and affection… i’m also sleepy but more sleep might be bad right now oops

☕️ coffee or tea: i’ll drink both but i mainly drink coffee and really only make tea when i’m sick

🤓 currently working on: a bunch of random stuff. maybe one day i’ll get to my askbox backlog ooops

if you feel like doing it go ahead i guess? i feel like a soup

Get to know me

Thamk you @she-who-drank-vodka-with-cats for tagging me <3

🎨 favourite colour: either a dark shade of red or tumblr blue (i don't really have a favorite color)

📖 currently reading: book-wise Corroded Man by Adam Christopher (it's one of the Dishonored novels). I stopped it in the middle because...

comic-wise I'm halfway through Diamond, Pearl and Platinum arc in Pokemon Adventures manga.

🎶 last song: Cha Cha Cha ofc impossible to get it out of my head

🎬 last movie: Watched Shrek 2 with my parents last Friday

📺 last series: ummmm hmmm idk I rewatched HIMYM earlier this year and I don't remember watching anything else

🍴sweet, spicy, savoury: savoury

🤤 craving: fries...

☕ tea or coffee: green tea my beloved

🤓 currently working on: this year pride crows :3

tagging @stillness138, @thirstyforred, @corporate-account

[dj-veteran-child]

UST by UtauReizo  Music & Lyrics: Noboru-P 

Been a while since the last upload, huh? It's October 1st, so I thought I'd put up something Miles-related. I've had this cover kicking around for... 3 years now that I decided to finally put up. 

 I got it in my head a few years ago that it would be a fun idea to give him appends named after the card suites. Actually, originally I was going to do that for Kei, but that was when Miles was accidentally born because I could no longer get the voice right. Over time though, these "appends" ended up having characters and minds of their own, and I decided each was actually a different personality apart from Miles. Story and character wise, it somehow made sense that they are actually all different AIs ended up installed within the same android. And things just developed from there. 

 This particular append I wanted to have a husky voice. The bank itself is VCV and tri-pitched, but never finished or released due to the errors in many of the recordings which happened due to the amount of breathiness in each sample. It was done with an older microphone, though. With my new one, I'm sure I could re-record the bank and have much cleaner files... but I just haven't bothered because I've been out of the UTAU scene for so long now. This is really the only complete cover I was able to squeeze out of it. 

 I have also recorded the Heart append, which is a soft bank. It only exists in CV form now but maybe I'll upload some covers I've done with it if I get around to that someday. The other two I planned, Club and Spade, never got recorded and were put on the backburner because I wanted to focus on Miles English -- which I did. But if I went back to recording at any point I would want to make a new VCCV bank for him. The likelihood of that... probably not good. It's been a few years since I've recorded anything. 

 Anyway, that's about all I got. Hope you liked this random info dump~ 

[utau-bowl]

Ameuta Niko-砕 Review

Reviewing the Ameuta family is now a longstanding tradition on this blog. Eventually I might review every single one of them, though I will admit making each of those posts unique is a little challenging...

This review was requested anonymously.

*Art by Otsuki Metro (大槻メトロ)

Hear a Sample of Ameuta Niko

Bio

Name: 飴唄仁胡/Ameuta Niko Species: Demon Gender: Male Age: late teens Height: 160 cm Likes: Noodles, museum tours Dislikes: Magic, losing  Theme: Purple Chitose Ame candy

Official Site

Here is Niko’s official page! The voicebank I’ll be talking about today is 砕/Kuda, which was released in 2016. It’s 31 MB when unzipped and has fully generated frq files. Also, here’s a list of what extra samples are included in his reclist, shared among the modern Ameuta UTAUs. You Probably won’t need this, but it’s nice to know what’s included.

First Impressions

Niko has a slightly androgynous, boyish voice. Like Niriya, who I reviewed before, he has stringed audio samples that are CV aliased. One fun thing about him is that instead of his given name being written in hiragana like the other Ameutas, it uses the kanji  胡 for ko, which means barbarian. I also think it’s cute he’s themed around a specifically Japanese candy and is pastel purple despite being a brash anime teen, I think that’s cute.

Configuration

Niko is a monopitch CV recorded at A3. He has a range of D3-A4, but can go a bit over that comfortably. He also has extra pronunciations, end breaths, vocal fry, and combined vowels. One thing I wish the Ameutas had is samples for more vowel combinations. They already have “ai” “ae” “ao”, and “au”, but not many others! The lack of smoother vowels is the main reason why I don’t use CV much. The stringed samples ultimately don’t do that much in terms of making a more natural sound.

The mic quality is pretty good here, but the voice just doesn’t translate well into the engine. Overall, he’s at about the same quality as the other Ametro UTAUs, not bad but not super special.

I like to add the g10 flag to him for a voice that better suits his character.

My recommended flags: g10H20F3E10

My recommended resamplers: fresamp12, EFB-GT

Final Thoughts

Niko is an above average CV with a cute, flexible voice and a lot of potential. I highly suggest you check out the other UTAUs in his series.

Got any other UTAUs you want me to review? Send an ask!