Presamp: under the hood?

[Agatechlo]

OK, so I DL'd presamp & used it for my latest cover using Kikyuune Aiko Japanese CVVC. Sounds to me like it's working OK, & it sure made the whole UST creation process a whole lot faster. It even renders the output faster because it spawns multiple resampler processes in parallel. But I'm not comfortable with it making all these decisions for me in adding VC phonemes without letting me see just what it's doing. I figured it would at least have some sort of lookup table that tells it what phonemes to add, but all I can find is an INI file that has a lot of hiragana aliases in it, but nothing that looks like a CV to CVVC table. Is this all hard-coded within the presamp EXE file? Thanks.

 

[MystSaphyr]

At default, presamp will subsitute VCV samples or add on VC samples within the render process, adjusting the consvel and length of the VC based on the consvel within the UST and/or the length that was selected via predit.

The presamp.ini is the configuration file that adds onto or overrides presamp's default settings. It allows one to include romaji/hiragana conversions without needing in-bank aliasing, and other quirky little extras like default vowel endings and whatnot (I'm pretty sure the one in Aiko is the default, Tomki added it in when he split up her wav files). But, as presamp is intended to be an automated process, by default (i.e. without a presamp.ini) it will grab and use the matching VC and - CV depending on the UST phonemes and nothing more. It's based on the standard aliasing method Japanese CVVC tends to use, which is what I originally otoed Aiko with: - CV (beginning of phrase), CV (blending) and V C (with the space between V and C)

If you'd rather throw in manual VC, however, don't fret! Just run predit again to be safe. Presamp knows to not interfere with manual user decisions and you can be free to use manual VC however you like in your tuning, while allowing presamp to do its thing on notes that don't necessarily need any fine-tuning. It prioritizes user-input VC and won't override them. It gets a little trickier when you have a VCV bank aliased with CVVC, though, Halo's had some issues with it being confused between selecting VCV samples and inserting VC. But all Aiko has in VCV style are her vowels and midbreaths ;v;/

 

[Agatechlo]

OK, thanks Myst. When I found that presamp.ini I expected to find some CV to VC mapping tables in it, but from what you're saying I guess that's all hard-coded within the EXE file. I thought that with all the different reclists in use that there wouldn't be a mapping that was "standard" enough to hard-code into presamp that was, but I guess Japanese CVVC is standard enough. It sure seems to work well on the cover I just made. The one issue I had, & I can't tell if this was a problem with presamp or resampler, is that I had a couple of phonemes that were really short (1/64 note?), & they ended up somehow being rendered as zero length. This caused all the following rendered notes to to shift forward from their graphical position in UTAU, IOW they weren't rendered in the proper temporal positions. I didn't really need the short phonemes: they were leftovers from the VSQX to UST conversion process & could easily be replaced with single phonemes & pitchbends. So once I figured that out everything fell into place.

Thanks again for suggesting presamp. I know you mentioned it a few times when I was working on the VOiCE cover. It's definitely a timesaver when working with CVVC. Now I wonder what we'll be able to use with VCCV?

 

[MystSaphyr]

I wish presamp had a VCCV system, but English is just as finnicky as ever haha;; you CAN make custom dictionaries in presamp but it's a bit limited right now.

As for the other issue, I've also noticed some UST conversions from VSQ/MIDI spit out super super super short rests and notes that you just gotta delete to get everything timed right (it's the exact same issue you get with converting an UTAU-Synth UST to work on PC UTAU). Not sure why those get made, but they're annoying and really the only thing you can do is delete them and check to make sure the notes are visually aligned properly to the grid. Sometimes note length changes too; if I notice something gets off and the notes are shifted, I have to go back and manually try to GENTLY tweak/shorten each one until something snaps into place (if that makes sense)