I wouldn't be surprised if Yamaha served Ameya a cease and desist to keep a stronghold on the vocasynth monopoly.
Yamaha did not trademark nor invent the piano roll or synthesized vocals and as long as that is the case, they legally cannot submit a CoD against UTAU; plus even if they could they'd be more productive submitting one against CeVIO and ones that actually make money off of it. UTAU also doesn't use anything that makes Vocaloid specifically unique (i.e. its synthesizer).
I honestly don't feel a brand-new engine is the way to go right now. We have Moresampler which is being actively developed, and there's the World resamplers, which are open source for tinkering. Writing a good engine is an assload of work.
We definitely do not want a new engine right now because that would fragment the community further, along with being completely unnecessary. Right now I just wanted to stimulate discussion on the fact that the current state is in complete stasis right now and as long as we're completely dependent on one dev who's been MIA for the last few years (all respect to him, mind you, as he's completely got the right to do whatever he wants), so as I said earlier the first priority would be to clone it, after which we then can talk about modifications.
I was hoping
@Lystrialle would update us on where this
"project" is headed.
It seems that we have almost everything planned
Quite unfortunately we don't have anything planned at all - we're just bouncing ideas off of each other at this point. The problem that we really have is that all of us have "vague things we could contribute" to a project, but we don't have a lot of people with serious time, or enough people to make an organized team. Most of us are primarily music enthusiasts (after all, most of my free time is currently going to trying to put out originals) and the kind of skillset we have doesn't quite overlap. I feel bad because I opened this topic and shortly after school came and snatched me away so I ended up not adding as much to it when I brought up the issue in the first place (OTL) but I still do believe in it quite firmly and would like to continue if we manage to get beyond "I coded this bit here".
I think
@Kinetic is not epic had a good start on the clone, even if it's not fully functional yet. The idea of an open-source thing is that it's collaborative, so we can't just have one person doing all the work on a project.
I wouldn't mind making a Utaforum-branch Discord group for it if people are interested, although I'm not sure how much it'll help until we create a clear focus.