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Event LearnUTAU Official Site Launch!

NordGeit

Your stubborn Yotsuba Channel frequenter. Direct.
Supporter
Defender of Defoko
I suppose now is a better time than never, especially since I told myself to get this up before Yule. Which it "has", for a while, but now everything is set up to the minimum specifications!
SSL certificate is up, HTTPS redirect on, site coded, compatability tested... Some things rewritten to restrain my emotions a bit more...

LearnUTAU

learnutaulogo2.png

A site for learning UTAU​

Lemme sell ya the pitch:
If you've dealt with MMD before, I expect you to be familiar with the venerable LearnMMD, a site born from the early ages and rose to be the main source of information for western MMD'ers.
Now you connect the dots and you realize that LearnUTAU is my attempt at making a similar site. Just... In my own style. And in somewhat limited capacity.
Why?
Because, while UTAU information isn't as hard-to-get as it was for Reggie back in the day when he founded LearnMMD, it's still scattered, chaotic, and difficult to grasp for some. Quite frankly, it lacks organization.
If you're dying to check out the site already, first temper your hype...
Here's the link to LearnUTAU.
Or just the raw link: https://learnutau.no/
I'll answer any questions I can think of in the post below

Going back to LearnMMD again...

How LearnMMD works​

LearnMMD hosts articles by Reggie Dentmore, the founder, but also from other MMDers. In order to ensure that things doesn't crash and burn, to write there, you have to:
1. Find the link at the bottom of the page that says "Find out about writing for LearnMMD!"
2. Locate the email Reggie sends you (It still works, actually)
3. Send Reggie an email explaining a bit about yourself and showing what you've done with MMD
4. Have a back-and-forth, or, in my case, get accepted instantly because I'm just that unique and Reggie got hyped (I shall allow myself to brag and you shall not stop me)
5. You can now access the wordpress "backend" where you can write and submit articles, however, the first few will be manually adjusted and set up by Reggie or whoever else takes over should he die, so follow the instructions given to you.
6. Your article gets accepted and put onto the page. If you're good, there's very little for Reggie to do.
???. After writing enough you may be able to put articles on there directly, at least that's what he told me, if I remember.
Source: I wrote this article on the site
Now, if you read all that, it's actually a pretty secure system.
However, there's something... Quite... Different, about my site.

How LearnUTAU works in comparison​

My site doesn't use Wordpress. Hell, it doesn't even use any templates. All of it is hand-coded and typed out by yours truly.
The reason for that is simply efficiency, compatability, security and customizability.
It loads fast and takes little space, it works with IE11 and even Netscape Navigator (some cosmetics are missing in Navigator), it's secure in that I know what's going on inside the site, and I can style it however I want in the future. Very web 1.0 like.
So, time to tackle the first concern a smelly one told me; How to keep information updated and correct!
First off, all articles will have a rating. As for now, there are five.
Well tested, well known (Essentially common knowledge, really hard to break if you follow it, would only really become outdated should something huge happen, like Ameya actually updating UTAU)
Works on my machine
(Works on a basic setup of UTAU. Mostly a rating reserved to me and whoever else rates these in the future, most likely tested on a VM or spare machine setup for testing)
Peer reviewed
(Enough people have sent messages saying it works, or a few trusted people have said that the information goes)
Unsure (Untested information, some things may be wrong, but it doesn't seem to be that wrong)
Prone to deletion. Proceed with extreme caution. (About to be deleted once site updates with new or edited articles, this is essentially a grace period where people may archive and change it)
So, it has an article rating system. How about submitting?
Here's where an even bigger difference comes in: Everyone, at least at the beginning, can submit. However, nothing goes directly onto the site! Also it's harder to make one.
So here's how you do:
Find out what kind of article you want to write.
Acceptable stuff includes: Techniques, plugins, basic functions, voicebank configurations, and on a nice day, some philosophy.
What's not gonna be accepted: Voicebank SHOWCASES, self-promotion, irrelevant stuff.
You then download an HTML template. The template includes the absolute minimum of information and an HTML file pre-setup for editing and studying, along with the CSS style the site uses and example files. Essentially, even if you come in with no knowledge of HTML, you should be able to figure out what you need to write an article. There's plenty of code comments explaining what's going on, and extra text files. A child should be able to grasp it. Do use something like Notepad++ though! Editing HTML without syntax highlighting will be absolute torture for you.
You write the article. It's up to you to figure out the image placements, formatting and whatnot, though I might fix it up. When you wanna test how it looks, just simply save the HTML file and run it in your browser. When you're happy with how it looks (Or it just looks... Good enough), as long as you followed the rules and guidelines I set, you can now zip up the html file and the image folder and pyon it over to me!
Zip up, locate email, send. The email I recommend you use is management@learnutau.no in the rare chance I might actually add someone else to manage it for me. The reommended title is: New Article - [Article name], and then you describe it, and make sure to include the files as well! I accept .zip, .rar and .7z files, as I know 7zip supports those.
I either respond with feedback, or tell you that it's getting added. If you get feedback of things to change or things I have changed, you didn't do good enough for the standards I set. Up to you to retry or not. If you get response with it getting added, you're winner!
Other ways to contribute, such as rating articles or suggesting stuff actually comes with the template, I'll put that on the site once I've had some rest...
Imma just copy from the contact information.txt file for ease of viewing and to give you an idea of just how much effort (and autism) I put into this.
If submitting a new article, "New article - content"
If suggesting something, "Suggestion - content" (For example, suggesting a CSS addition or a text editor to be added to the text editor list)
If rating a preexisting article, "Rate article - content" (Essentially, if an article has the "unsure" rating, you use this to either bump it up to Peer Reviewed or down to Prone To Deletion, make sure to specify why!)
If requesting an article, "Article request - content" (If there's something you're wondering about when it comes to a plugin or what a button does, you can request an article, and I'll put the request up on the site.)
If something else, "Misc - content" (Or miscellaneous if you wanna be fancy)
Essentially, this is a manual, hard-to-abuse system that filters out a lot of people with low technological literacy, or those who aren't that good at following technical instructions.
In order to keep stuff up-to-date, I'll try my best to stay on top of developments, but you can always contact me with any news that needs updating.
Is it cumbersome? Yes. Is it difficult? Yes. Is it inconvenient? Absolutely!
... Is it secure? Yes, the main weak-point is me, and the more I manage and update the site, the better I get. Especially as the more knowledge gets submitted, the more I learn and can easier detect faulty information.
This site is created to solve a problem I have, and to collect the knowledge publicly so anyone can freely access it is something I felt I had to do.
If this site takes off and people actually write for the site, the more the site grows, the easier it gets for new tuners to get into and gain proficiency with the program, thus overall improving the quality of the media created with UTAU, thus potentially giving it a better reputation as a follow-up. Or it can go opposite and lowering the bar of entry will make it worse. Well, nothing doing but to try!
...
Now, time for some questions I think some of you may have.

What's wrong with the current knowledge solutions?​

This is actually part of the about page of the site, but I'll put it in here.
Especially now that public dislikes have been disabled for an amount of users on youtube, bad or outdated tutorials are harder to detect.
As for other video hosting sites, barely anyone uses those, no matter how much I wish they would.
This makes solid information harder to obtain. Though Yuunari's (incomplete) tutorial was where I and many others started... Well...
The last issue is, even with a good video, you're still restrained by the video creators pace. And they can be slow, or incredibly bloated.
For comparison... Here are some tutorials on how to make an audio visualizer in kdenlive. (Youtube links)
11 minutes of this clapped guys face. The guide I initially followed.
5 minutes and outdated information. Includes unnessecary intro.
Gigachad 3 minute video, but goes through the steps quickly at the 2:28 mark, so honestly just 45 seconds. And it's my own tutorial.
So yeah, honestly, having articles you can read and absorb at your own pace is way superior.
Searching up information in these can turn out to be hellish. While writing this, I'm still not sure how to add Teto's appended voicebanks.
Now while I, personally, am registered to Utaforum and could just ask, I'd honestly rather not. And it's worse for those who don't have full control, nor an idea, of how to manage an email account, or register, or just tag and put it correctly.
No amount of pointing to the correct place to ask is going to help because some people are just dissapointments, you know.
Essentially, it's hard to search in a forum because of repeat questions, imperfect wording, coherency issues, and I'm pretty sure some people are getting tired of answering the same questions on repeat. Having a solid site that holds all this is a good solution to the problem.
It shares some of the problems with the forums, but even worse, since to get into one of these to get the information within, you need to:
  1. Have an e-mail account, and most likely also a smartphone with a phone number (Hope your phone number works!)
  2. Accept the terms and guidelines of the service(s) in question (Which includes some of them nabbing yer data and letting them spy on you)
  3. Find an invite link to the group chat (or server or whatever),
  4. Read the rules for this specific niche, even if you just need one or two things,
  5. Hopefully appeal enough to the clique with your question or them just letting you in in the first place,
  6. And then, finally, get your questions answered or be sent to some pinned post.
Even if it is a community designed around helping others, if you're not interested in commitment, you just want s- ahem one piece of info, you still have to go through a lot of hoops.
I'll stick a rant about discord especially somewhere around here, but to summarize: It locks out people under 13, openly non-mainstream thinkers, and you're at the mercy of a moderation team on both the service and server which [[Has a reputation for being horrible, insufficient, selfish, and overall terrible]](Text edited to fit utaforum standards)
Just tell them to make a LearnUTAU article already. I don't make any profit off this. And even if I allow donations, I won't pocket any of it myself.
While they do contain usable information for learning, they don't have much of stuff from the ground-up.
This site is meant to contain absolutely everything from bottom to top of tutorials, plugins and methods, aka this site is specialized for teaching one how to tune, oto, append, use plugins etc, but nothing else. Right now they (the wikis) seem more like databases to hold UTAUloid information.
That's essentially my problems with what's already here. Well, that and outdated sites.
LearnUTAU is meant to be accessible, organized, and more flexible to each readers information absorbtion speed. If someone reads and absorbs text really fast, it would be a shame for the only relevant information to be in a 10 minute video where the narrator is speaking at maximum 2-3 words a second and wastes time not getting to the point, now would it?
Or if you have a free-thinker, who either refuses to use or is banned from all sorts of platforms? Where will the man go to learn UTAU?
Or the guy is funny hacker anonymous with disabled javascript, in which case this site doesn't use javascript.
Essentially, this site is built to let anyone that isn't the most fringest of the fringe, in which case they probably don't even have a computer, to access the site and the articles within.
A truly neutral site, no matter what beliefs you hold, no matter how weak your machine (with exceptions) or how slow your internet (again, with exceptions), you shall be able to learn the program, at your own pace.
But...

In order for this dream to become reality, someone needs to do stuff, right?

So... That's what I did. Nobody else seemed to be willing to just do it, so that's what I did. I paid for a years hosting, so you have plenty of time to write an article, I learned to setup and code the basics, so many configurations can access it, and I provided the resources for... Well...
This is where YOU come in. I have nowhere NEAR enough knowledge to make the articles for this site alone. I don't know how to OTO, I don't know how appends work, I don't know japanese, I don't know all that much really. Enough to do singing, and enough about Teto english to make some decent speech, but nothing else.

So, that's all the basic stuff done, now for some small questions.

How will you update the site?

When I get a new article and it passes, I simply add it to my local copy, and then send the files over to the server and put it where it belongs in that file system. A small test is performed to check that everything works okay, and then I add it to the article index.

What happens if you die?​

Before the site goes down, just take everything. The html template contains everything needed to reconstruct the site in styling. As for everything I put on the site, in the event of death or abandonment, you may take the content and host a mirror. If someone else is managing the site, they will take over, but just to be sure, archive the site if you figured out I'm dead and the new owner hasn't changed anything... YET.

Tell me again why the site is the way it is.​

Web 1.0. There is no vital user data being stored on the server, mostly just statistics, the site is built to be light on resources, and I have the ability to style it how I want, allowing for a unique look.

Why a .no domain?​

It's also hosted at servers inside Norway, and this is why.
tetosfavcountry.png
Well, that and I'm norwegian myself, of course. So it's a bit easier for me.
I'd make a meme video but there wasn't enough art of MSJ teto, but it was gonna be great.

I could manage it better myself!​

Well guess what? You didn't take the initiative. I did. I was the one who decided to create the site, and I was the one who took in the effort to set it up, and I was the one who spent my own resources on it. Deities know what you were doing while I was here trying to figure out why the SSI didn't work, and why the SSL certificate didn't exist, and why the image was going over the borders.
So before you start complaining about some of the ways I decided to run this, take a step back and ask yourself why you didn't do any major efforts. However, you have the chance to rectify your lack of action and start helping me out.

*something about discord servers*​

No. As explained, discord servers are inoptimal for providing knowledge for users. In fact, hold on...
I'm glad I saved this. Yotsuba has some of the finest discussions once in a blue moon.
<!---(((Some complaining about how finding information back in the 2000's was easier, valid complaints really, part of why LearnUTAU exists, then moving on to today...)))--->
>a link to discord
The last one is the worst because usually you find out that is where the community is centered. So you give in, run discord inside of a locked down browser, and make an account just to get access to the information. You go through all this only to see
>WHOOPSY DOOPSY ANON!! WE'RE SORRY BUT YOU NEED TO BE REGISTERED FOR 222 DAYS, JOIN THIS OTHER SERVER, [[Hyperlink Blocked.]], AND BEG US IN THIS PUBLIC CHANNEL FOR ACCESS!
>their "server" has stupid drama while you're waiting and the mods nuke everything

<!---In response, another anon replied:--->
>discord
>their "server" has stupid drama while you're waiting and the mods nuke everything

This one is especially frustrating because the information being gatekept is [[Absolute PLONKERS!!1]]. I swear I'm not a [[MAN WHO HASN'T GROWN UP]] but I still play one video game with an IRL friend. We've played for a long time so new techniques are hard to find on our own now. One little thing can change the entire meta and keep the game interesting for both of us.

The character I play (and all the others plus the game itself) has a community of people that share information. The problem is they're all on discord and no one bothers to update anything outside of it anymore. When I first went to their discord channel all the sections with links/videos and discussion was open to everyone. Months later I went back again because I needed to reference something. Even though I'd been in the channel for months by now everything was locked down. There was some [[WEAKLING]] message about drama I didn't care about and this [[DUMB!1]] process to re-gain access. They had to make sure I wasn't a "spy". [[WHAT IN THE BLOODY REMAINS OF TEI'S VICTIMS.]]. It's a fighting game character not anything important.
While I know not every server follows this example, it still explains the problem very well. Discord gatekeeps, LearnUTAU doesn't. And if I need to add instant messaging in the future, you bet it will be something that doesn't require an account. LearnUTAU is open, for everyone, for as long as it can be sustained.

I got quite a bit passionate there... But you get the point. LearnUTAU, for what flaws it has, is supposed to be open and accessible to anyone and everyone.
..
..

... I just want a good place, free of drama, free of politics, organizing the collective knowledge of the UTAU community.
So I put in the effort to create the frameworks.
Now I just need your participation, and we can hopefully start a new era of UTAU. One where getting into UTAU doesn't have to be as difficult as it is.
So, I ask of you...

Will you create a new future?​

It's... 01:15. 1AM. I can't answer any questions within at least 8 hours of this posting. But ask anyway, I genuinely do care for this project. I so earnestly want this to work, for this site to grow into a fully-fledged site containing everything one should need to get started and to get proficient in UTAU.
If you're already convinced you want to contribute, you should find everything you need in the site itself.
Please. I've had one too many late evenings putting my spirit and energy into this. Lay down your selfish and prideful thoughts about yourself and what you're doing, and help me, help everyone, out.
skygoat.jpg
Background stage: Masisi
Goat: me
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Keep the Faith. Credit your sources.
 

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