why haven't you switched to openUTAU?

[IO+]

I use both UTAU and OpenUTAU for quite sometime now, i use UTAU for plugins but for 90% of editing i use OpenUTAU.
I would say UTAU still have place but they will slowly fade away... eventually.

I have quite a few laptop that has been build in different timeline (technology wise) ranging from socket LGA 775 first launched in 2004 with a whoping 2GB of DDR2 ram (quite a lot in 2004) I use with windows 7 and modern laptop with windows 10 (gen 12 i5 LGA 1700 ) with16GB of ram and OpenUTAU performance is solid regardless of OS or specification. It is indeed, require a proper driver install and setup especially framework and runtime (windows update) people have to understand that.

OpenUTAU UI is Excellent, with clear separate track view and midi editor view, they lean toward traditional workflow that almost every DAW use for over 4 decade, there is some issue with the software but they update regularly, the phonemizers is very helpful but definitively need some tweak.

For a free software with this kind of performance? I don't even bother to complain.
The developer do their homework very hard, i'll take my hat off to developer.

 

[Halo]

i can relate, it was a bit weird not inputting phonemes into the editor but you can override openUTAU from doing it automatically. i don't quite remember how, i think it's in the flag settings or some shit like that, but you could input phonemes instead iirc

Regarding this topic: If you just use the DEFAULT phonemizer, you have to input just like OG UTAU, but if you use the phonemizer you can mix input methods by putting a ? in front of the manual edits (like when you want to override automatic prefix maps/autoVCV in OG UTAU) OR for most phonemizers you can at least choose the phonemes manually by [t I p i ng]/[l I k]/[dh i s]. It's very easy and you don't need to touch expressions/flags/whatever.

Visual proof:


Edit: also, StAkira and the other contributors are beasts. There are regular (daily~weekly~monthly) bug fixes and updates; it's not like OG UTAU where it just has Quirks™ that have been that way since 2013 (no shade to ameya!). If the last time you used it was months ago it is completely possible the bug you encountered or workflow issue you had has been addressed or smoothed out. For example, you can now use custom wavtools so if you didn't like being forced to use worldline-r if you wanted VCV to flow correctly, you can now use wavtool4vcv or wavtoolex without issue. I really do recommend checking back in periodically and/or reporting bugs when they come up for you.

 

[Mashi]

As much as I want to use it (cause it's open source and looks modern), it's just so laggy in my end + audio cracks issues, it can be my machine cause it's old and maybe because I'm using Linux? For me, dotnet is just, (in my experience) kinda meh in Linux? And, in the end, I just use UTAU in wine, it kinda works for me as of now.

 

[bluemule64]

im kinda mixed feeling on both but
atleast u can use plugins on utau tho

 

[IO+]

im kinda mixed feeling on both but
atleast u can use plugins on utau tho

That's exactly how i use utau nowadays, just for plugins. Although i hope OpenUtau creator considered to implement the plugins but imo is quite hard or impossible due to almost all plugins that use in utau are very old and aging poorly (coding wise) remind that almost all of these plugins are purposely design for UTAU so they do not support modern software like OpenUtau. I think this is the reason why the creator don't implement plugins function on OpenUtau yet.

In my opinion UTAU editor is still mandatory for editng voicebanks behavior (Aliasing, oto, voice config etc.)

 

[Kiyoteru]

You can use UTAU plugins in OpenUtau. Put them in the "Plugins" folder. To run them, in the piano roll use Part > Legacy plugins > select your plugin.
This is a list of plugins that have already been tested. If a plugin hasn't been added to the list yet, please help the community by updating this wiki page with your test results.

Legacy Plugins

Open singing synthesis platform / Open source UTAU successor - stakira/OpenUtau

github.com

 

[Baphobloody Goat Dream]

I'm just going to list them.

1. The envelope UI is TERRIBLE. Everything is incredibly unclear.
2. The wavtool is incredibly choppy and makes even a VB as bulletproof as Yamine Renri sound absolutely choppy. I can't change my wavtool to something GOOD like wavtool4vcv.
3. There's nowhere near as much granular control
4. The phonemizers, especially the ones for English and French, are of incredibly poor quality, and often produce far worse results than manual note entry in og UTAU
5. So. Many. Goddamn. Crashes. I've had UTAU crash on me maybe twice in my 2 and a half years of using it, and I've had OpenUTAU crash at least 50 times, including one time where it managed to crash Windows.
6. It's much slower than og UTAU to render, if I'm using my preferred resampler (Moresampler)
7. It makes VBs with extras a pain in the butt to use due to the phonemizers not playing nice with extras.
8. Most plugins do not work.
9. Getting things to work like a character portrait is really annoying.
10. Save last play is a feature I use a LOT that is not available in OpenUTAU
11. Trying to get a project to play brings my PC to a screeching halt
12. The dictionaries being used are just BAD, and you can't customize them.

EDIT:
13. There is absolutely zero reason this program should take longer to launch than it takes me to open a UST in the original version of UTAU, pick a voicebank, and tune a 30 second long demo piece using the pitedit plugin

I second a lot of this. Especially when it comes to Engrish tuning, I planned on doing a "I tried using the ENG -> JPN dictionary in OPENUtau" video, but I found it so frustrating to work with that it wasn't worth the effort. I usually use Ritsu's Strong or KIRE bank for her Engrish, and it was piss poor for trying to edit everything in. It didn't help that everything seemed to cluster together, and I couldn't find any way to separate them. I don't want her to say "buroken" I want her to say "broken," and I already know how to! Let me do that!

A personal complaint (along with the lack of a something like a user-dictionary) is just how hard it is to do alternate pronunciations (for English specifically.) Since I can't change how any given word is spoken, I have to find a way to spell it all out phonetically if the way I want it said doesn't match the way OPENUtau decides it should be said. An example of this is how I tend to say "smile" as a word with two syllables ("s m ay ax l" or something adjacent in arpraising) but most programs default to one syllable ("s m ay l.") That's great for people who say it that way, but to me it sounds weird. In Utau or Vocaloid (or heck, literally any other program) I just adjust it manually. I expected it (going into OPENUtau) to be similar to Vocaloid, where you could manually type in phonetic information in whatever version of English the voicebank uses. I was sadly surprised to find that extending it with a "-" didn't give me the room to, since I couldn't just type into that "error" phoneme with whatever I wanted. Similar note: the lack of any ability to delete/add phonemes to a given word is incredibly annoying as someone who has been tuning English on the fly since roughly 2015 (way before putting anything of mine on the internet to share.) I've only been good at it for maybe 3 ~ 4 of those years, but that's still a long time to get used to having all that time to customize to be greeted with... None.

It also makes using any non-standard voicebank (or language not included in the dictionaries) incredibly annoying, since I'm just doing what I'd be doing in Utau anyway (placing individual notes) only to get a choppier, sometimes kind of ear-grating end result. I think OPENUtau has improved greatly since it first came out (I pretty much used it once and called it garbage then,) and I think it could improve a good deal. I do use it from time to time, if not even just to see how far it's come since I last opened it. Regardless though, I would never switch over fully unless everything GeneralNuisance mentioned got addressed, let alone my niche concerns when it comes to language tuning.

 

[Kiyoteru]

A personal complaint (along with the lack of a something like a user-dictionary) is just how hard it is to do alternate pronunciations (for English specifically.) Since I can't change how any given word is spoken, I have to find a way to spell it all out phonetically if the way I want it said doesn't match the way OPENUtau decides it should be said. An example of this is how I tend to say "smile" as a word with two syllables ("s m ay ax l" or something adjacent in arpraising) but most programs default to one syllable ("s m ay l.") That's great for people who say it that way, but to me it sounds weird. In Utau or Vocaloid (or heck, literally any other program) I just adjust it manually. I expected it (going into OPENUtau) to be similar to Vocaloid, where you could manually type in phonetic information in whatever version of English the voicebank uses. I was sadly surprised to find that extending it with a "-" didn't give me the room to, since I couldn't just type into that "error" phoneme with whatever I wanted. Similar note: the lack of any ability to delete/add phonemes to a given word is incredibly annoying as someone who has been tuning English on the fly since roughly 2015 (way before putting anything of mine on the internet to share.) I've only been good at it for maybe 3 ~ 4 of those years, but that's still a long time to get used to having all that time to customize to be greeted with... None.

To manually specify the phonemes for a word, please write them inside of brackets. In your example, write [s m ay ax l]


To extend a word across multiple musical notes, please write +.

 

[Komokori]

I sometimes use it, but I like og UTAU more. I'll list my reasons why I don't use it completely:
1. Often crashes
2. Doesn't like it when I try to use CVC russian banks.
3. It HATES when I use it on my lil sisters computer (i record on her computer when my step-dad is using his mic)
4. enveloping is TERRIBLE
5. Plugins. They just don't work nice.

 

[Halo]

I sometimes use it, but I like og UTAU more. I'll list my reasons why I don't use it completely:
1. Often crashes
2. Doesn't like it when I try to use CVC russian banks.
3. It HATES when I use it on my lil sisters computer (i record on her computer when my step-dad is using his mic)
4. enveloping is TERRIBLE
5. Plugins. They just don't work nice.

1) Theres a current ongoing issue with WORLDLINE-R. if you let WORLDLINE-R pre-render and theres a sample with an oto.ini issue or a file with the wrong settings that's what causes most crashes. The solution is to turn off pre-rendering and set the render mode to CLASSIC, and ideally also set a non-worldline resampler while you're there. Then you can turn pre-render back on if you like. You could probably use a template project to make this more efficient, but it shouldn't be on the user really :/ It's really frustrating, but until we get a preference for default renderer/resampler, that's the workaround.

2) Unsure what the issue here would be other than point 1!

3) a completely fair reason haha

4) I think maybe the issue here is that there's not really envelopes, you're supposed to use expressions if you want to adjust dynamics and such. It makes it so the "envelopes" are only for the timing and not also dynamics, which is how it should be imho

5) Can I ask what plugins are you miss the most? I find I no longer need most of the ones that have issues bc they're just sort of built into OU, but if there are any specific ones that just break and don't have a replacement it's worth knowing.

None of this is to "convince" you ofc, just want to make the times you DO use it less of a pain.

 

[CloudyKnights]

Honestly I just... didn't even know it existed, so I just reinstalled UTAU. I've been so out of the loop that I hadn't even known it released, so I might give it a shot while I work on Noah's VB~

 

[Komokori]

1) Theres a current ongoing issue with WORLDLINE-R. if you let WORLDLINE-R pre-render and theres a sample with an oto.ini issue or a file with the wrong settings that's what causes most crashes. The solution is to turn off pre-rendering and set the render mode to CLASSIC, and ideally also set a non-worldline resampler while you're there. Then you can turn pre-render back on if you like. You could probably use a template project to make this more efficient, but it shouldn't be on the user really :/ It's really frustrating, but until we get a preference for default renderer/resampler, that's the workaround.

2) Unsure what the issue here would be other than point 1!

3) a completely fair reason haha

4) I think maybe the issue here is that there's not really envelopes, you're supposed to use expressions if you want to adjust dynamics and such. It makes it so the "envelopes" are only for the timing and not also dynamics, which is how it should be imho

5) Can I ask what plugins are you miss the most? I find I no longer need most of the ones that have issues bc they're just sort of built into OU, but if there are any specific ones that just break and don't have a replacement it's worth knowing.

None of this is to "convince" you ofc, just want to make the times you DO use it less of a pain.

Pitch Editor, it's easier to use than drawing it myself in OU. Because of this, I do the pitching in OG UTAU, constantly save to hear the new changes, and then go back.

 

[Gardanana]

thinking about this... there were two main things i wanted in OU. they already did one, which was the ability to individually select resamplers and wavtools per track, but the one last thing i need to completely switch over is the ability to type flags for each track (kinda like in og utau) or the ability to select a group of notes and set them all to certain flag values (like in og utau or vocalsharp). i use so many flags, currently utau's flag system works better for my workflow than OU's current system

 

[MoaHarbour]

thinking about this... there were two main things i wanted in OU. they already did one, which was the ability to individually select resamplers and wavtools per track, but the one last thing i need to completely switch over is the ability to type flags for each track (kinda like in og utau) or the ability to select a group of notes and set them all to certain flag values (like in og utau or vocalsharp). i use so many flags, currently utau's flag system works better for my workflow than OU's current system

I believe you can already do this with flags in OU. There's probably a less complicated way to do this but here's how I do it

1) Open the expressions panel and go to "alternate"

2) Make sure the "type" is set to "option"

3) In the option values area, type in your flags. You can type in several different flag combinations. You just need to separate them with commas.

4) When you open the piano roll, go the bottom left and select the ALT expression. You'll see all the flag combinations and will be able to assign them to notes.
-If the flags don't work, try adding quotes around your flags. (EX: ",Y0H0B0F0,F0P99C99E0" as opposed to ,Y0H0B0F0,F0P99C99E0)

You can also add single flag options very easily. You just need to click the bottom left plus button. Then you can easily add in whatever flag you want!

 

[Halo]

Pitch Editor, it's easier to use than drawing it myself in OU. Because of this, I do the pitching in OG UTAU, constantly save to hear the new changes, and then go back.

Do you draw freehand or use pitchbends? You can do both on-note instead of using the PIT expression, if that helps at all. If you can go into greater detail about why you find it easier that may help, too.

 

[Gardanana]

I believe you can already do this with flags in OU. There's probably a less complicated way to do this but here's how I do it

1) Open the expressions panel and go to "alternate"

2) Make sure the "type" is set to "option"

3) In the option values area, type in your flags. You can type in several different flag combinations. You just need to separate them with commas.

4) When you open the piano roll, go the bottom left and select the ALT expression. You'll see all the flag combinations and will be able to assign them to notes.
-If the flags don't work, try adding quotes around your flags. (EX: ",Y0H0B0F0,F0P99C99E0" as opposed to ,Y0H0B0F0,F0P99C99E0)

You can also add single flag options very easily. You just need to click the bottom left plus button. Then you can easily add in whatever flag you want!

oooo thanks that's good to know! still very complicated to assign the flags to the notes tho since im pretty sure they dont allow group assigning yet;;;;

 

[viiridiian]

honestly? i don't know how to use it. i installed it, but i'm too lazy to even try do anything with it, lol.

 

[Halo]

oooo thanks that's good to know! still very complicated to assign the flags to the notes tho since im pretty sure they dont allow group assigning yet;;;;

Yeah, annoyingly you have to select the phrase/everything you'd like to assign the flagset to, zoom out so you can see the whole selection, and drag across the option you'd like.

for option and numerical expressions, though, there IS the ability to shift click which locks the drag to the first value chosen which means you get a straight line instead of accidentally selecting, like, random other flags/colors/etc in the list. eg.


There was a point when this tool let you set everything in the selection at once w/o dragging if you liked, I'm not 100% on why that was removed. I know I'd like it back too.

 

[Gardanana]

ooo the shift click is a game changer!! i wish there were better documentation about this stuff,,, im so glad to now know this is a thing, thank you!