New Digital Diva - SELENA

dyne 智優

Shoutbox Lurker™
Defender of Defoko
Ummm......
XD I mean, I can't seem to open the official Selena page no matter how many times I tried to reload. Are you guys revamping the page, moved it to a new link or... it's my slow internet connection? (On second thought, considering the speed of buffering YT vids I wouldn't say it's my internet connection, also forgive me I'm terrible at English)
 

Info-Chan

SELENA Developer
Tutor
Supporter
Defender of Defoko
Thread starter
XD I mean, I can't seem to open the official Selena page no matter how many times I tried to reload. Are you guys revamping the page, moved it to a new link or... it's my slow internet connection? (On second thought, considering the speed of buffering YT vids I wouldn't say it's my internet connection, also forgive me I'm terrible at English)
Are you going to http://digitalsofficial.com/ ?
 

songzombie

Momo's Minion
Uh, there's a lot of comments about the art... I agree with a lot of what's been said over it but I think it's beginning to distract from the actual voice? SELENA's design is really important, but even if Pepper commissioned a professional to draw her/gave her the most interesting & unique backstory, this stuff about the actual software makes me a bit concerned :/

Reading the comments made me more confused about what the software even is. There's lots of talk about Festival and Flinger, and Pepper mentioned some things that should go on the FAQ - which says Festival is the synth, and nothing about Flinger other than mentioning it exists.
So, Festival is free, but SELENA's the product. Like, how UTAU is free but some voicebanks are sold? I think that's what Pepper's trying to say.

I did some research, since nowhere in this thread makes it clear what Festival/Flinger are.
http://vocaloid.wikia.com/wiki/Festival_Speech_Synthesis_System
This says that Flinger is required for Festival to sing
http://www.cslu.ogi.edu/tts/flinger/
This says that Flinger is a program that synthesizes the voice based on MIDI input, and that it's based on Festival (which suggests to me that it's separate)?

We are working on a GUI for Flinger. We are not however making one for Festival, it is easy to enough to navigate and tutorials will be made for the engine.
...I'm really sceptical about this, I don't know if you can pull this off (especially when you sent a screenshot of what you thought was a Graphical User Interface for Flinger, which turned out to be the command prompt). Out of curiosity, who on your team is responsible for programming and what language are they using? http://utaforum.net/threads/fluid-vocal-synthesis-system-utau-net-front-end.9873/ Check out this thread, where part of the development is on the UI. From the looks of it, making one from scratch seems really hard.

Plus, the point of a GUI is so that people don't have to use the command input - although inputting text is easy, it's not necessarily intuitive, especially for a voice synth. I'd take UTAU's clunky UI any day because at least I can see the notes on my screen; a long pink bar with "あ" on it makes more sense than what I can see when UTAU renders the notes (where you can see it churn out tonnes of text in the command prompt). Tbh, using command prompt is a step backwards - computers used to all be text and input like that until someone thought to make the desktop and cursor...

I know you're not changing the design, and I understand that. I won't convince you to do that. But if you're really considering selling SELENA as a product, maybe think about hiring a professional artist to do her box art? It's not just the design, the skill of the art could be a lot better, it's not something I'd put on the box if I were the one selling her. Designwise: anyone with a little knowledge on colour theory knows that blue and orange are complementary; basically they're "opposites" and despite the name, complementary colours often clash. I'm not saying "avoid blue/orange"; Melobunii's fanart demonstrates it can be done tastefully (and most movie posters are tinged blue/orange to contrast) - but it is...distracting when SELENA's clothes are really bright.

It's really cool you've got your own website domain, that probably costs money. I like the font you used for her name, it suits the cyber parts of her design and her space motif. Large parts of it are gray though, and is the text meant to be aligned like that? It looks like its supposed to be in the middle, but the text is to the left.

Questions:
  • So what made you choose to develop a voice for Festival? Instead of, for example, making an UTAU bank and selling that instead.
  • What made you pick the space theme she has? I ask because it does remind me of Stella, who also had that.
  • Is developing a voice for Festival very different from UTAU?
  • Why should I, as a potential customer, buy SELENA? I could use UTAU for free, spend my money on the hundreds of existing Vocaloids, or even make my own voice for Festival (since that's allowed and I've just found the section of their manual on "building a new voice").
  • Who is your target audience? The UTAU and Vocaloid communities? See above. Professional music producers? Who would want to download Festival, Flinger and the third-party GUI for 1 voice?
This isn't hate, I think you should be asking yourself this, since selling her voice means you will be competing with all the other voice synths around.

Sorry I sound like I'm tearing this down, like everyone else here I'm just voicing my concerns (and we're not trying to change your mind on anything, Pepper, I admire your professionalism about this).

(Does anyone else think all the groups popping up to develop voices goes back to the age old "wouldn't it be cool if I had my own vocaloid"? inb4 kenji and aki confirmed for dex&daina MISHA CONFIRMED FOR RUBY it's like having your own multipitch CVVC UTAU with ending breaths and 6 appends isn't enough anymore :'D ...)
 

na4a4a

Outwardly Opinionated and Harshly Critical
Supporter
Defender of Defoko
I can chime in a little about the Festival/Flinger confusion.
Flinger is a custom build of Festival that is built for singing, as such it uses Festival as a base. Operability between the two is thus very similar.
....that's all I have to say....
 

Info-Chan

SELENA Developer
Tutor
Supporter
Defender of Defoko
Thread starter
I'm fine with answering questions. :wink:

1. We chose Festival/Flinger because we wanted to do something different and we liked the technology. With Festival/Flinger we can make talking voicebanks. Not to mention we wanted to help Festival/Flinger get more popularity. Since I am the leader I naturally chose the theme and it was space because I love astronomy and it's a very beautiful subject to me. Not to mention I think alien life is a very interesting subject. I don't believe in martians per say, but I do believe that people live far away from Earth. Maybe in another galaxy.

2. Developing for Festival is VERY different from UTAU. There is no such thing as an oto. You need to use a program called Festvox to separate the wav files and then code them together into a voicebank.

3. SELENA will be a mature voice that's capable of very smooth singing. Along with that singing is high quality speech that can be used for variety of things. Some examples are you can use her for projects, presentations, and videos if you don't have a microphone.

4. Our target audience is the UTAU and VOCALOID community, but it's also partly professional producers. We're doing our very best to bring a high quality product.

5. The person responsible for coding on our team is mainly Aya. I help him from time to time with design input and some simple coding since I don't know a lot. We all work in English and all live in the United States.

6. Yes we are making a GUI for Flinger. The premade GUI someone DID make is long gone. I feel the need to remind people that Festival and Flinger were made in 2001. They do get updates, but most of their contents were years ago. This GUI will not be separate, when it is finished we will release SELENA with the program. We are building Flinger into the GUI.

7. About Flinger being needed to sing, yes it's needed to make fully functional singing like MIDI input and lyrics, but you can load .xml files into Festival for some limited singing. We're using Flinger and making a GUI for it's very simple to use.

8. We aren't making a GUI for Festival because it is easy enough to use already.

9. About the design, you seem to be misinformed. We got a new design after multiple people said the old one looked absolutely awful. The new art is drawn by Fanicom.
 

...

Retired User
Retired User
Defender of Defoko
I also wanted to ask, when will you guys pick the voicer for SELENA? I'm really excited for what you guys have planned! :creepy:
 

songzombie

Momo's Minion
Hey thanks for replying to my comment, I appreciate the effort. So I take it you guys are trying to make an all-in-one singing/talking voice for various things, not just singing? Maybe you should put some emphasis on that because it looks like an advantage over things like UTAU which only sing (without needing fiddly plugins etc)

When I said language, I meant what programming language - C#? Python?? Something else?
 

Info-Chan

SELENA Developer
Tutor
Supporter
Defender of Defoko
Thread starter
Hey thanks for replying to my comment, I appreciate the effort. So I take it you guys are trying to make an all-in-one singing/talking voice for various things, not just singing? Maybe you should put some emphasis on that because it looks like an advantage over things like UTAU which only sing (without needing fiddly plugins etc)

When I said language, I meant what programming language - C#? Python?? Something else?
We will try our best to also promote her speech library, and to your question about the programming language, I can't really say. While I may be the group's leader, I'm not too experienced in programming. I know some things, but not a lot, I'll ask Aya though. I also have an update! The E.T. Promo is going to be out very soon! (Aya is our true programmer if you're wondering.)
 

Info-Chan

SELENA Developer
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Defender of Defoko
Thread starter
UPDATE 10/21/15 - The E.T. Cover is finished and the video will be out hopefully by this week or next week!
 
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