Can I change my locale after installing UTAU?

CapuccinoMachine

Momo's Minion
So, I'm pretty new to using UTAU. Took me a while to even figure out how to install it, but I got my locale changed to Japanese and it runs perfectly fine. I don't know what changing locale does exactly other than changing what language the code in my computer runs on (I think?) so I tried looking up if it's safe to change my locale back to English after installing UTAU, as it only said it needed the locale switched to Japanese during the download and never specified if I had to keep it switched permanently. I could never find an actual answer, only tutorials explaining what I already knew. I feel like the answer to this is painfully obvious, but I just want to be really careful since I'm not sure if anything on my computer has been or will be affected by this change.
 

WinterdrivE

Ritsu's Renegades
Defender of Defoko
You can change your locale after installing utau, however you cannot open utau with anything other than Japanese locale. You'd need to change it back to Japanese prior to using UTAU.

For what it's worth, nothing modern should be affected by your locale. Locale settings are mostly a hold over from older software made prior to Unicode (and it's proliferation) and prior to the idea that someone could possibly want to use a software internationally (imagine that). Coding for characters used to be separated by language and character code "coordinates" overlapped between languages, so they could literally only be one language at a time. (Eg, the coordinate A1 might be A in English, but A1 is also あ in Japanese, and ㄱ in Korean, etc). Because they have the same set of coordinates, the computer has to know which one to interpret it as, and the locale setting is what computers rely on for this. If the language the software was made in and the locale of the computer don't match up, the code is read wrong and it spits out whatever the equivalent is in the wrongly interpreted language's character set, resulting in gibberish (eg, what happens to utau when run under English locale. The underlying "coordinates" are the same, but you're seeing what they are in the English character set (many of the coordinates are invalid which gives you the question marks or blocks, and the other gibberish is the ones that coincidentally happen to be valid))

Hopefully that gives you a better idea of why it will always need Japanese locale to run properly. (Keep in mind I'm not well versed in coding and this is my not super technical understanding of how it works)

(Most modern programs aren't reliant on locale because they use Unicode, which includes multiple languages and gives every language its own unique set of coordinates in the code, so the computer can interpret all of them at once and doesn't have to choose)

TL;DR: You can change your locale after you've done the initial setup properly with Japanese locale, but you can only run UTAU with Japanese locale

[Edit]
The reason you need Japanese locale when you first download and install utau is because those messed up gibberish characters will get hard baked into the code if downloaded and installed under the wrong locale. It also causes other problems under the hood beyond just the displayed messages and characters being messed up.

It's been a while since I've had to change my locale for any reason, so I don't remember if opening utau under a different locale after it's been properly installed permanently mojibake's it, or if it only displays incorrectly and will return to normal once the locale is back to Japanese. My recommendation would be to just not risk it and not open it if it's not in Japanese locale, but if you just really want to know, you could always back up anything utau-related and experiment to find out if just opening it under a different locale causes permanent problems, and if it does, reinstall and restore from your backup
 
Last edited:

CapuccinoMachine

Momo's Minion
Thread starter
You can change your locale after installing utau, however you cannot open utau with anything other than Japanese locale. You'd need to change it back to Japanese prior to using UTAU.

For what it's worth, nothing modern should be affected by your locale. Locale settings are mostly a hold over from older software made prior to Unicode (and it's proliferation) and prior to the idea that someone could possibly want to use a software internationally (imagine that). Coding for characters used to be separated by language and character code "coordinates" overlapped between languages, so they could literally only be one language at a time. (Eg, the coordinate A1 might be A in English, but A1 is also あ in Japanese, and ㄱ in Korean, etc). Because they have the same set of coordinates, the computer has to know which one to interpret it as, and the locale setting is what computers rely on for this. If the language the software was made in and the locale of the computer don't match up, the code is read wrong and it spits out whatever the equivalent is in the wrongly interpreted language's character set, resulting in gibberish (eg, what happens to utau when run under English locale. The underlying "coordinates" are the same, but you're seeing what they are in the English character set (many of the coordinates are invalid which gives you the question marks or blocks, and the other gibberish is the ones that coincidentally happen to be valid))

Hopefully that gives you a better idea of why it will always need Japanese locale to run properly. (Keep in mind I'm not well versed in coding and this is my not super technical understanding of how it works)

(Most modern programs aren't reliant on locale because they use Unicode, which includes multiple languages and gives every language its own unique set of coordinates in the code, so the computer can interpret all of them at once and doesn't have to choose)

TL;DR: You can change your locale after you've done the initial setup properly with Japanese locale, but you can only run UTAU with Japanese locale

[Edit]
The reason you need Japanese locale when you first download and install utau is because those messed up gibberish characters will get hard baked into the code if downloaded and installed under the wrong locale. It also causes other problems under the hood beyond just the displayed messages and characters being messed up.

It's been a while since I've had to change my locale for any reason, so I don't remember if opening utau under a different locale after it's been properly installed permanently mojibake's it, or if it only displays incorrectly and will return to normal once the locale is back to Japanese. My recommendation would be to just not risk it and not open it if it's not in Japanese locale, but if you just really want to know, you could always back up anything utau-related and experiment to find out if just opening it under a different locale causes permanent problems, and if it does, reinstall and restore from your backup
I think I get it now... at least I understand it better than I did before lol
Fortunately I don't have a lot of old programs that don't use unicode (to my knowledge) so I'll just leave my locale on Japanese for now.

It seems like locale is more just there to keep older programs from not working properly in other regions, which is a problem that just about everything doesn't have nowadays.
Thanks!
 
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