Shadow Reviews

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I hope you like the banner design, my grumpy face will be staring at you like that for quite some time now.
So here's how this rolls:
You people give me voicebanks and I'm going to reviews them, plain and clean. I will review sound, configuration, ease of use and all that jack. Design maybe perhaps but don't really bet on that.


Just fill in this jack:


Voicebank Name:
Download link:
To be noted:


and that's about it. Happy sending. I'd say I'll review about every bank I'll be getting, but that might also be influenced by the amount of motivation I have and some other things.
So.
And since I don't have any bank on hand, just go on and...send me your banks.

@UtauReni :

Sure thing! I'll just wait for you to pass me the link in that case.

@Lemondolly :

As in, things that you can tell me about the voicebank. Known issues, things like that.

To start off, I’m not in the position to complain about the banks I’m asked to review. I won’t complain for that matter either. The only exception I make is when a voicebank messes with my system, and even then I wouldn’t completely call it complaining.


The voicebank we have here is It’s a CV style male bank with about 132 samples whose first web presence I could track down to 05.05.2012.


The bank has a young, boyish tone to it while the intensity is pretty strong. Not Ritsu KIRE strong, regular strong. When used the voice sounds a bit muffled due to the recording quality, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Speaking of the quality. The bank seems to have been recorded with a built-in microphone or a cheap headset, thus being of rather low quality with quite some noise. Again, a low quality doesn’t automatically make it a “bad” voicebank. The samples provide roughly half a second long actual audio to work with.
When looking at the oto.ini, I noticed that the samples for ちょ, ちゅ and りゅ were missing, as well as the j- and y-combos being the only ones to have -e-samples. The pronunciation is spot-on and an accent only slightly noticeable on the –o-samples. I’d like to note that the bank provided r-samples as well as l-samples; the r-samples had the proper pronunciation (which I am biased to like) and thus it’s nice to also have l-samples in case you want to, I don’t know, go through the pain of doing engrish or if you need lalaing.
The oto.ini-configuration itself was alright. Again, first thing jumping into my face was the near-total lack of overlap values. Only one sample actually used it.


Quick break: Overlap defines how the previous note blends into the one you’re configuring. Giving it a positive value will let the previous note blend into this one (commonly used for what I like to call soft or stretchable sounds, i.e. s-, m-, n-), whilst a negative value will shorten the previous note, resulting in a “gap” (think the pause when saying k-, t-, d-, the hard sounds).


So by now you’re probably like “Shadow, that’s nice and all, but what the **** were those three first sentences for in that case?”
This voicebank only works with one sampler.
This voicebank only works with one ****ing sampler.
I’d been told beforehand that one sampler didn’t work with this bank. When I wanted to test how it’d work with a sampler apart from resampler…
First the sampler crashed.
And then UTAU followed.
I’ve been working with UTAU for more than three years now and I’ve hardly seen something like this happen. There’s about five or six samplers in the folder and every single one of them apart from resampler refused to work here.
Well, I thought to myself, can’t be helped, I’ll just work with resampler in that case and look for a solution later on. It’s a damper on the available usage freedom to only have the voicebank work with one sampler, but not something to classify something as a bad bank.
From time to time while working with this bank I switched to another window of UTAU to work on my own stuff. After a while I frowned: Nearly all of my voicebanks are kept on my server in the cellar, so by now I was used to some banks generating sound more slowly than the two or three banks I keep on my hard drive, but this time around it was even slower than usual. After about five minutes of generating it played and I switched to TIPS. Again: really long generation time. Shrugging, I didn’t plan on rendering the full wav file of this today anyways, I closed that window and went back to the internet, where a nice video that piqued my interest crossed my path. While I watched I got an IM from a friend and that’s when all hell broke loose. I tried pausing said youtube video and an immense lag started before it finally properly paused. There were some more occurrences, but long story short, somehow the usage of this voicebank had completely  ****ed with my CPU.
“But Shadow, couldn’t that be because of the heaps of programs you had opened?”
No. As I write this I have opened about the triple amount of stuff than yesterday when all that happened. Using the voicebank just seems to have put a damper on the CPU until I shut down and restarted my system.
Nearly as soon as I had noticed all of this I got my lazy ass to look for what was causing all this shit. I compared the wav-files to others from other banks I own. They were the same except for one tiny tidbit: These files here had two channels. Again I frowned and went to ask another friend, this one having worked with UTAU for about two year himself now, if this had ever been a problem with UTAU. He said that no, normally not, and that his UTAUloid’s first bank had also had samples with two channels. Afterwards I meddled around with one of the wav-files and got to export it as a single channel file. After the five minutes UTAU took to boot up and load the voicebank I gave it a test.
Resampler: works.
TIPS: works.
Bkh01: works.
So now I am not sure if I can pinpoint it to being due to the samplers being racists nowadays, UTAU being racist or if it’s really due to the voicebank.

Conclusion:
A voicebank with potential which clearly needs rerecording to fix that huge channel-****ing. I’d only recommend it to users who’d go through the effort of converting the 132 samples to  single-channel and meddle a bit with the oto.ini. The others? Wait for an update. Once that get fixed, you’ll surely like working with it.

@Ant

Ah, don't worry about my computer, that's alright. Might as well have happened with the second voicebank, or the tenth or the 651023rd. Using a 3DS microphone has been new to me now, though!

Zonbi Fuuko


No, not every review is going to start off like the last one. I don’t have time to think about witty and cool introductions like that.


I’ve been asked to take a look at

Zonbi Fuuko​

,
a female CV bank with 190 samples whose first web presence was listed as 13.09.2010. Regarding that, the proper Romanization should be “Fukou”, according to what I’ve seen while typing the Kanji, but that’s not the point of this.


As I’ve said in my previous review, lower quality samples don’t make a bad voicebank. Same rule applies the other way around, too: a high sample quality doesn’t automatically make it the best voicebank in the world. When I opened up this one here and started listening to some of the samples I noticed that – ****, those a really clear samples. There’s close to no background noise! What I also liked was that all samples were almost religiously consistent with 1.1 second length, thought I find most soft consonants to be relatively short, which makes it a bit tricky to use and configure properly.
The voicebank has a young, girly tone to it. The strength of the vocals seems to vary depending on usage, but I’d generally consider them more strong than soft. As said, the sample quality is really high, though when actually used it sounds kind of garbled. Not sure if this is due to the oto.ini settings or because the samples are so sharp and clear.
The first thing I noticed when unpacking the voicebank: there’s an extras folder. Extras folder naturally pique my interest, since, you know, extras are things you don’t usually find in your downloaded voicebanks. I was a little disappointed – well, not really disappointed, just a feeling of my hopes going back down to standard – when I found it only filled with a few extra samples for other languages. Still, it’s a nice addition, though I doubt you can fully crank out any other language than Japanese with the few extra files it provides. I only doubt, though, not saying it’s impossible.
Taking a look at the oto.ini itself, I found two samples to be unconfigured. てゅ was the only sample of this kind (as in, ty-combination), び was listed twice for some reason and め had once been configured as it is as well as “ne”, which I found somewhat unnecessary. Again, I’d like to emphasize how helpful – I don’t want to say necessary, because some might say that’s bullshit and find another way to get around it – negative overlap is.

This time I got to properly test the voicebank with the samplers I have. My first go was with TIPS. I don’t recommend it; the voice turns out really, REALLY nasal, by which I mean more nasal than TIPS is with other voicebanks.
Bkh01 makes the voicebank sound a lot softer, though a bit more muffled and to my ears it seems as though it is also a bit more nasal compared to resampler.
Fresamp just makes it sound softer. It’s to be said that most of the clarity that was achieved when using resampler was gone whilst using another sampler, the exception being TIPS, though I doubt nasality is a gain compared to clarity of voice.

Conclusion:
If you’re searching for a high quality sample voicebank with a young voice, this is your thing. You maybe want to meddle a bit with the oto.ini to achieve a better tone when actually rendering the vocals and not having it sound so garbled.

Kaeru Reni


Let me say beforehand that I have a huge ladyboner for VCV-style voicebanks. Not that I say CV is bad or anything, but I myself find VCV easier  in usage. Also I am listening to Black Sabbath.


Today I was asked to take a look at
It’s a full VCV female bank with 240 samples whose first web presence was listed as 02.02.2010.


The sample quality is really good with no background noise and a loud and clear sound – by which I mean when looking at the files in the oto editor you don’t have to get a magnifying glass to be able to discern the soft consonants from the vowels because they’re so ridiculously small.

The voicebank has a feminine, light and rather soft sound, though the latter can be tweaked out when mixing the rendered vocals. The pauses between the syllables are not too long – this can become a problem if you’re using fixed uniform values not tailored for the recording tempo you’ve used, so I was told – which results in a natural sound when rendered.
I was pleasantly surprised when I found that this voicebank came with an artwork folder containing the “official art” for both the past, the actual and an alternative design. I’ve happened to cross so many voicebanks that didn’t come with an official design to portray the voicebanks character with in those three years of UTAU – and sometimes it can become a real pain to have to search how you’re supposed to portray the character.

One of the first things that jumped me right in the face when looking at the oto.ini was that there were some .frq files missing. Of course, a missing frq file isn’t the end of the world – that can happen to everyone, even the people of VIPPER – though they probably check twelve times before they release their voicebanks and thus this isn’t apparent to us people downloading their voicebanks – but it’s still time you spend rendering those. I most probably wouldn’t emphasize this as much as I do now, too, if it wouldn’t be for me having noticed that well over 100 frq files are missing. To add to that about 18 strings aren’t even oto’d at all.
The parts of the bank that were configured though have been fitted with your standard uniform values of Consonant 450, Cutoff -600, Preutterance 300 and Overlap 100. What also pleasantly surprised me here was that the voicebank provided end breaths – combinations like e - , a -, and so on.

As always, I tested the voicebank with a few other samplers. Bkh01 resulted in the rendered vocals sounding comparably hoarse, Fresamp made them sound more nasal. Tips rendered more muffled vocals compared to resampler and you got your usual “glittering” sound – as I like to call it – on long notes.


Conclusion:
A good VCV bank with high quality samples, though the lack of a lot of frq files and some strings being completely unconfigured cause quite the inconvenience when you’re up to using it – investing in configuring them yourself is rewarding, though.