Before I begin talking about this, I don't want to make people think that I'm trying to fear or panic-monger; it's just that with every passing year I find this to be a more and more pressing issue that's gotten surprisingly little coverage despite how serious of an issue it could potentially become. So I'm making a thread in the hopes of maybe just getting more people to think about it.
UTAU is free (technically shareware, but functionally free). However, it is not
open-source. In a nutshell, this means that the only person who can make any updates to the program whatsoever is Ameya, and Ameya only. This is normally not a problem when a developer is active and regularly pushing updates, and whoever makes whatever software is perfectly free to do with it what they like. But for whatever reason (personal life being busy, unwillingness, whatever), development on the program UTAU has not updated since 2012 (Windows)/2013 (Mac). Hell, the page for Windows UTAU still uses
Windows XP as its base recommendation.
In light of recent discussion I've been reading on the topic of emulation and a particularly thought-provoking
xkcd comic, the fact of the matter is that UTAU working in Windows 10 completely unscathed was by sheer luck, and we can't count on this luck to continue in future builds of Windows or the Mac OS. Of course, I certainly don't expect UTAU as a phenomenon to continue persisting into all of eternity (especially since its sister program Vocaloid is a closed-source commercial program that's utterly reliant on Yamaha's support), but a closed-source software without an active developer is a ticking time bomb that you can't even read the counter on. Emulators exist, but they decrease in efficiency the deeper you go, and you can't guarantee all the time that they'll work; it would be a shame for a community as thriving and self-sustaining as UTAU to die off because it fell victim to a closed-source software being unsupported.
In addition to the issue of survival, there are a few minor issues as well - UTAU, being primarily self-sustaining, simply evolves far too quickly for a single-manned closed-source program to handle. Right now, to use UTAU to the potential that the community demands of it, you need a giant handful of third-party plugins with incomplete integration with the editor; even common things like VCV and non-Japanese languages require some very hacky solutions because we're bounded by the limits of a program that hasn't seen updates since 2012. On top of that, the differences between the Windows and Mac versions of UTAU caused a minor fracture in the community, which could have been easily mended by developers with both systems working together to resolve those differences. So the open-source model is probably what would work best for the community.
There are a few things in our favor.
- The nature of UTAU means that a number of its components are already exposed - much of the work is handled by the wavtool and resampler, which can be provided by third parties by default, and so the most pressing issue is making a shell that can contain those functions, oto.ini/prefixmap configuration, and UST files. (This is already a tough task as it is, but it's nowhere near the difficulty of building an inbuilt engine from scratch.) It also means that you can tailor a theoretical new program to fit exactly the comfort needs of existing UTAU users without forcing them into a new learning curve.
- Secondly, UTAU in its current form is a pretty basic, lightweight program, meaning that the Windows version at least will be likely to survive at least a few more OS migrations. (I cannot be as sure about the Mac version, but that's only because I've never used it much.)
There have been a few attempts at making an open-source equivalent or clone of UTAU, such as
Cadencii and
OpenUtau, but neither have really gotten off the ground due to the lack of urgency (OpenUtau has had only two developers and hasn't seen a new commit in the last year). The unfortunate reality of the situation is that UTAU is a fairly niche community to begin with, and although we do have talented programmers who have been able to provide us with many wonderful resamplers and plugins, the vast majority of us mainly work as end-users. (I myself am studying computer science in university, but I am nowhere near the skill level required to code something like this from scratch.) That said, I think this is an issue that's been rather low-key for something that should be treated with a
lot more urgency, and we need to start thinking about how we want to approach it in the future.
tl;dr: we need to think about how we're going to continue sustaining UTAU in the future or we're gonna die a lot earlier than we should