Dedicated Mac user popping in here to dish the Mac side of the equation, because I have had more than my fair share of fun trying to make my Mac-built voicebanks compatible with PC UTAU. There are several steps needed to make a Mac-built voicebank work properly on a PC. It’s a bit of a process, but not that difficult, once you figure out exactly which wrenches have fallen between which gears. Here's the laundry list of cross-compatibility issues I ran into, and what I did to fix them.
- Converting OTOs for PC Use -
The primary reason a Mac-built voicebank will fail to work on a PC is the OTO. PC UTAU uses ShiftJIS encoding, while UTAU-Synth uses UTF-8. Thus, when a Mac-built voicebank is imported into UTAU, the voicebank is non-functional, and the OTO will appear completely mojibakke’d.
(Fortunately, this doesn't go both ways. When UTAU-Synth loads a PC-built voicebank, the first thing it does is automatically create a copy of the OTO.ini as a file it dubs “oto_ini.txt.” Any updates or changes made to the OTO in UTAU-Synth will be made to the new oto_ini.txt file — the original OTO.ini will be left untouched.)
Converting a Mac-made OTO for PC usage is actually fairly simple, once you know how to do it.
1) Open the oto_ini.txt file in a text editor, preferably one that knows made for coding. I use and highly recommend TextWrangler for this — it’s amazing, and also free (made by the good folks who make BBEdit.)
2) Create a new document, then copy-&-paste the contents of the oto_ini.txt file into the new document. Go ahead and remove the top line, “#Charset:UTF-8.” There’s no reason to leave it in, and leaving it in may actually cause issues when UTAU tries to load the voicebank.
3) Save the new file as “oto.ini” using “Shift JIS” as the encoding type.
Important Note: if you encode in hiragana or katakana, it’s possible that when you try to save the file in Shift JIS encoding, the program may refuse to do so, citing the presence of “incompatible characters.” When I had this issue, it was the V and Vy sounds, aliased in hiragana. I opted to rename the affected files and aliases in either romaji or katakana, or both. If I have learned anything from this experience, it's that the “Find and Replace” tool is your friend.
- Configuring Multipitch Voicebanks -
One of the most drastic differences between UTAU and UTAU-Synth is how they handle multipitch/multi-folder voicebanks. In order to recognize the files in each folder, UTAU requires that each folder have it’s own, individual, local OTO.ini for the files within it, basically making each folder it’s own little voicebank.
UTAU-Synth users may find this an alien concept (I know I did,) because UTAU-Synth has no such requirement. As far as it’s concerned, the only OTO it cares about is the primary OTO located in the voicebank’s main folder. It completely ignores the other sub-folder OTOs.
Creating OTOs for subfolders can be a pain, but not much harder than creating an OTO.ini from an oto_ini.txt file. Copy, paste, and exercise some caution when deleting. Tactical use of Find and Replace can and will save a lot of time. And sanity.
- Compression Issues —
Some compression programs are incapable of dealing with hiragana or katakana characters that include dakuten or handakuten — those file names end up corrupted, and UTAU can’t deal with them. As a result, any sounds with filenames or aliases using those characters end up dropped.
The solution — use a compresion program that knows what it’s doing. For this, I strongly recommend Keka. It does it's job, does it extremely well, and also happens to be free. Can't argue with that.
On the flip side, Mac users who can't use PC voicebanks are likely being slighted by their decompression software. Not all decompression software can handle ShiftJIS, and the end result of trying to decompress an archive full of files encoded or written in ShiftJIS is lots and lots of mojibakke. I highly recommend The Unarchiver -- a decompression program capable of handling lots of archive formats, and most importantly, files with foreign character sets, like Japanese. It's also free. (If you're noticing a theme here, it's that I love not having to spend money on awesome software.)
- Testing Things Out in Wine - (Revised)
From my personal experience, UTAU can sometimes be finicky in Wine. I used Wine a bit on my previous computer (an older machine, running Mac OSX 10.6.) -- not all resamplers functioned in the Wine environment; some crashed UTAU outright. I have no idea if this was a product of the program trying to run on an older machine , but the fact that it was an older machine running an older OS is worth mentioning. Regardless, unless you change the locale of the Wine environment to Japanese, you won’t be able to use any voicebanks that aren’t encoded and aliased in romaji. (EDIT: I didn't know how to do this, until KLAD popped in to explain how below.) Refer to KLAD's post beneath this one for how to do that using Wineskin.
![[K] of Honor](/data/medal/1_1406930084l.jpg)
