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...