Wiki Wednesday #1 - Akiro Sakene / 酒音アキロ

Who is Akiro Sakene? Where can I download 酒音アキロ? Who made Sakene Akiro?

Wiki Wednesday #1 - Akiro Sakene / 酒音アキロ

Sometimes I find things in this fandom and I'm confused. Akiro Sakene is one of those things. Released in December of 2018, it's understandable that there aren't many uses of Akiro. However, what makes no sense is that there are no usages of Akiro. I went to seek out any covers posted by the voice provider, but the only information I had to go off of was the name "SapphireP". Amazingly, searching "SapphireP UTAU" lead me to a Furry UTAU Amino. 

As you can see, that wasn't exactly helpful.

By going to the UTAU Wiki and checking revision history, I was able to find SapphireP's usual screen name "GleamingSapphires". Through some intense Googling, I was able to find his YouTube channel. There's no mention of Akiro! 

Generally, I'd assume that this was just a failed idea that the voice provider burned all mention of. Akiro has a really cool website, though!! Someone spent time making that website look super cool, and then never used the bank the website was for.

So what in the heck?!

The Bank Itself

So, I know it's not exactly fair to harp on OTOs. But these made me go "huh?"

huh?

Redoing OTOs or paying Ryan a few bucks to fix them isn't a big deal. The honest truth is that OTOs don't impact the quality of the bank, only the user experience. But the OTOs are all like that. Who taught GleamingSapphires to do this??

If you honestly prefer it that way, then you do you. You don't have to change. But I'm still really, really confused about it.

Apart from that one really weird quirk, Akiro Sakene's "Stellar" bank is pretty good. The "r"s are unaspirated "d"s and the "d"s are aspirated to show the difference. The vowels aren't perfect, and the palatalized consonants aren't palatalized, but that's really, really nitpicking. If you don't flip out over tiny details, the bank's accent is on point!

The bank has CVVC samples, but of course I don't mess with that. As a CV bank, it's pretty solid. There are some cases of noises in the background, and the microphone quality is pretty standard.

It's a pretty standard bank. Whether you use it or not has more to do with the design.

The Character, Akiro

Akiro is a furloid, but not your typical furloid. 

Official Art Packaged with Bank

His design reflects his young age of 16 years old. He likes coffee, hates alcohol, and is part of the LGBT community.

I'm sure that if SapphireP continues work on Akiro Sakene, he will eventually grow into a more typical furloid design with time. But, we will only learn that if he keeps on working on him! With the complete lack of content, I'm not sure if that will happen.

The Website

Ok, the website is really cool. I know that with modern tools, it isn't that difficult to create cool webpages. But I have been using the Internet religiously since at least 2003. I'm easily impressed!

But I'm really confused about the Japanese. Why? There's no English in sight! The grammar is strange. When I put my conspiracy theory hat on, I almost think that SapphireP never meant for people to link him and Akiro. Maybe he wanted to fool us all into thinking a Japanese user created Akiro! But, romanizing "ページ" as "pezi", using a bit.ly link, and using Mega to upload the bank told me instantly it was a Western user. Also, uh, all of the documentation inside of Akiro's bank is in English. So, I'm pretty sure it was just a design choice and not a conspiracy theory. 

Where to download Sakene Akiro?

Download Sakene Akiro on his download page. The link is the "bit.ly" link next to "ダウンロード". The link is not a hyperlink, so you need to copy and paste it into the address bar to access it. 

I went into this confused. How could there be no content involving this UTAU?? I came out even more confused. The bank is decent and SapphireP is still posting UTAU content not about Akiro to this day! Maybe soon, there will be Akiro content out there. You never know.

Wiki Wednesday #0 - Introduction

What is Wiki Wednesday? Who will be featured on Wiki Wednesday? 

Wiki Wednesday #0 - Introduction

Hi there! Recently, I realized that there is a finite number of UTAUs that can be recovered. If someone uploaded their UTAU once to MegaUpload and then threw their computer into the river behind their house, finding a copy of it would be like finding a hen's tooth. There are UTAU banks out there that have never been downloaded, not even a single time.

That means that if I want this blog to have content, I need to expand past the "rescuing" part of "Search and Rescue". I am already doing that with "Forgotten Friday", but only one post a week feels a little underwhelming. For that reason, I am committing to adding a new feature. 

What is Wiki Wednesday?

Wiki Wednesday is the opposite of Forgotten Friday in its criteria. In Forgotten Friday, it does not matter how many views an UTAU's videos have gotten as long as the UTAU has not been used by a Western audience within the last five or so years. For Wiki Wednesday, it does not matter how many times an UTAU has been used nor time frame of those usages as long as all of the works have a small number of views. I will of course adjust the criteria on the fly. I always end up doing so!

How does a bank end up on Wiki Wednesday?

I get the majority of the banks I use for Wiki Wednesday from the UTAU Wiki Dot. I'm nostalgic for the original UTAU Wikia, but it's just easier for me to use the Wiki Dot. Besides, the domain change from Wikia to Fandom made it not exactly a Wiki. (Joking, joking. The domain change still has me shook, though.)

The first criteria is low view counts on all videos. I only check NicoVideo and YouTube. For YouTube, I work with the quality of the bank and design to decide the cutoff point. I will do my best to keep the view count for the most viewed video under 300, but I will make exceptions for videos that are flukes based off of things like being a duet with Teto. As far as NicoVideo goes, anything under 1,000 is worth consideration. I just feel like it's easier to get eyeballs on NicoVideo, so I'm not as strict on that. 

The second criteria is that the voice provider must not have a more popular UTAU. The UTAU that inspired me to start this feature was Elias. I was so shocked that such a high quality UTAU was so unknown until I did research into who GeorgiaSonic was. Her current UTAU, Pankune Kinzoku, is sitting pretty with her most viewed video at nearly two thousand views. This feature is meant to bring up newer users who are virtually unknown, not draw attention to users who already have attention. If the voice provider has multiple, equally unknown UTAUs, they then qualify for an Investigation, not Wiki Wednesday. 

The third criteria is subscriber count on YouTube. If a user has a subscriber count of one thousand, they don't need my help getting eyeballs. The subscriber count is a way to equalize out view counts on videos that may be a fluke. If an account with 19 subscribers posts a duet with Teto and gets 500 views, I would still consider featuring them. The people came for Teto and left the person in the dust. If someone with 1,000 subscribers had posted the same video and it got 500 views, I would disqualify them immediately. 

In less words, I will feature a bank if no one really knows it exists. I wanted this series to focus more on Western UTAUs to begin with, but I started my research with pages created in January of 2018 so that there was plenty of time for the UTAUs involved to accrue views before declaring them as "having low views". The issue was that some kind soul came in and added a giant amount of pages for Japanese UTAUs. I really like Japanese UTAUs, so I end up seeing if they meet the criteria and downloading them if they do anyway. 

I do reserve the right to randomly not write about banks that fit all of the criteria. There was an UTAU that fit the criteria perfectly, but sounded just like me. I was really creeped out and didn't want to touch it because I felt really, really creeped out. (And the voice provider was a dude from Germany from what my little research showed. I'm a girl from America! How does that happen?!)

When is Wiki Wednesday Posted?

I may rearrange the schedule in the future, but for now Wiki Wednesday is posted once every other week, or semimonthly. On the weeks Wiki Wednesday is not posted, there will be a Monday article. Monday articles range from recovered UTAUs to investigations. Recovered UTAUs are easy to write for but rare, and investigations take hours to write. That's part of the reason I added Wiki Wednesday - to give me a small break from my research heavy investigations! 

The posting schedule will ideally be Monday and Friday articles one week, Wednesday and Friday articles the next, and then back to Monday and Friday. Depending on how much time I am able to dedicate to this blog, I may expand to Monday, Wednesday, and Friday articles every week. However, I find that slightly unlikely!

I hope that I can introduce people to new UTAUs using this feature! Check back every other week for a new Wiki Wednesday 😃

Forgotten Friday #5 - Coyote and Mayonika

Who is Mayonika? How can I download Coyote's UTAU bank? Who is that one cute UTAU with ears that has that brown color scheme??

Forgotten Friday #5 - Coyote and Mayonika

So, let me start by saying that I've always had a place in my heart for Coyote. In the one video I made using her, I called her an underappreciated UTAU in the description.

(sorry for the mix, it was 2010, man.)

Despite only using her once, I always remember her just being there in the periphery. I'm not sure how such a relatively unknown UTAU left such a deep impact on me, but such is life.

Instead of writing solely on the lovely Coyote, I decided to include an UTAU that is distributed on the same site by the same person. A little digging shows that Mayonika's voice provider (Mayonaka) is, in fact, not Coyote's voice provider (M. Kamiya). I sent M. Kamiya a follow request on Twitter as that is slightly less creepy than a random email to an address that may be defunct. I gotta ask about the VCV, man. (Well, the prospect of VCV. There is no VCV as things stand.)

With that introduction, let's start talking about the banks!

コヨーテ（伺）/ Coyote

Coyote is adorable, ok.

peek-a-boo!
Official art packaged with bank

For more official art, you can visit this page on the site that distributes her.

Coyote's most recent bank is a standard CV bank with some extra samples to help with other languages such as うぇ andすぃ. Updates to the bank are provided in their own separate ZIP files. Those extra ZIP files don't seem to do much more than swap out a few files and give quite a few alternate versions. 

Some files from plus_01 

For some reason, the OTOs are done incorrectly.

aaaaaaaaarrrrgghhh

She still sounds super cute with the OTOs done incorrectly, though.

If you asked me to place the voice, I would say the best way to put it is that Coyote is a Japanese Camila Melodia. The voice is mature, yet sweet. Soft, yet matronly.

If you want to try out Coyote for yourself, here is the download page! To download it, click the link that says "Download". The "plus" ZIP files are the links with numbers in them.

Note: Coyote has two other banks available. Coyo_Test has no OTOs and very short samples. Coyo_Uka feels like a mix of the test bank and version 4. I'd suggest sticking with the official, most recent bank.

マヨニカ / Mayonika

There isn't much information about Mayonika there. There's no Wiki pages nor UTAU archive pages. This may be in part due to the fact that Mayonika is missing quite a few samples. When I say quite a few, I mean literally every "youon" other than ones like cha and sha. (I just learned that word today!) In less fancy terms, anything with a consonant then a 'y' in the romaji is missing. That means that there's no きゃ、ひゃ、or びょ.  (Maybe if he can't say 病気 he can never be sick!)

This can easily be fixed with enough patience and copy and paste in Audacity or REAPER. (For example, if you cut off the palatalized consonant in り, you can use that consonant and the vowels provided to make りゃ, りゅ, and りょ.)

Mentioning OTOs after pointing out that using this bank may involve literally editing the WAV files seems silly. Regardless of all of that, the voice is pretty darn nice!

This is the kind of bank that you tend to avoid unless you love the design. You can find banks with similar voice types that don't require creating a good number of samples yourself. The design is pretty darn adorable, though!

Official Art Packaged with Voice Bank

I'd love to see someone update the design to look super cool and modern someday!

If you're interested in playing with Mayonika, the download page is here. I downloaded the first file for my test render. ノイズ means "noise". That bank has had noise removal performed. Usually I would download the one without processing, but I was more tempted to download the more recent version!

I hope you have fun!

Mayonika is a silly detour, but Coyote is a real star. I love her voice and the muffled nature of her microphone so much! I hope someone finds these UTAUs and loves using them. Feel free to leave a comment with any cool stuff you make 😃

mx's WHITE - A Catfish UTAU - Recovered!

Where can I download WHITE? What is Michiyo's White Append? How good is WHITE?

mx's WHITE - A Catfish UTAU - Recovered!

Let me start by saying that I wish this UTAU had a different name. This UTAU was originally released in December of 2009. Saying things like "OMG WHITE IS SO AWESOME" generally wouldn't have a smidgen of negative connotation a decade ago. Now saying that just feels dang awkward. (The names BLACK or BROWN would be equally as awkward, mind you.) But, the name is what it is at this point. I'll try to not be too wrapped up in how awkward the whole phrasing is so that I can actually write this article.

It was freshman year of high school.

Life was kind of rough. I don't know why, but I had just decided to crash at my grandmother's house. Home was only five minutes away, but no one brought me a change of clothes. I had passed out in my school clothes and woke up feeling miserable. My jeans were soaked in sweat and slowly drying into a hard cast around my legs. That's when I got on my grandma's old XP computer and pulled up YouTube.

I didn't really feel like I had that many friends. I tried to embed myself into the UTAU fandom as deeply as I could to try and make any kind of meaningful connection. When I wasn't working on UTAU or school, I was watching as many overseas UTAU videos as possible so that I could leave comments. 

I clicked on a video by 4616P and my mind was blown.

The video and the cover are long, long gone. Wayback Machine doesn't work on the YouTube channel and the icons of the video weren't included in the emails regarding comments. But it was unlike anything else the overseas fandom posted. It was just a certain sound that made me feel like things were going to be okay. Of course I raced to leave a comment.

I didn't expect it, but 4616P and I started talking. I loved talking to her. She told me about her life in the Czech Republic and silly stuff like that. In Geography Class, when I told everyone about my friend in the Czech Republic, everyone looked at me like I had two heads.

They were right.

Eventually, I found out I had been Catfished. Not for a few weeks the way SRS would do it (love ya Cyn), but for four months. Four months of regular contact. 

Not only was I being Catfished, it was by someone I had looked up to ever since I first learned about UTAU. Stumph. Or, as she prefers to be called, mx. It was a right mess.

Years passed and I still loved WHITE's voicebank. When my old laptop died, I had never taken the time to transfer the banks over. I asked around about it, and no one had a copy. I thought she was gone forever.

But then I just tried starting that old laptop again.

After tearing my room apart looking for a backup, I just stopped and asked myself if the old laptop was really dead. I moved around my way too large unread manga collection and fished it out along with the charger that was 50% electrical tape at that point. I plugged it in and started it . . . and it worked! Of course, I was lucky that my mom had made an account on it. My account had a password that I couldn't type because specific keys were dead. I had a USB keyboard, but it wouldn't work with the XP laptop for some reason. I had to get in, change my password, get out, get back in, and then work on transferring files.

My 1TB external hard drive wouldn't work. I plugged it in, and apparently it just doesn't work on XP for some reason. So I had to search up and down for a flashdrive. Everything went well enough . . . until the flashdrive started randomly disconnecting in the middle of file transfers. I couldn't get everything, but I luckily got what I wanted. The entire reason that I pulled it out and started this blog.

I got WHITE.

I literally have no idea what the design was.

I made (by tracing, it was 2010) some really bad art of her once. Apparently she had an MMD model at one point.

Image from UTAU Visual Archive

She was never really a real character, and MX has purged most info about her. Why are her eyes brown in my drawing and red in the model? Which one of us was right? I guess no one will ever truly know.

WHITE has three banks.

The three banks are the original CV, the full VCV, and mwhite. The original CV is what I fell in love with. I had such fond memories of it. However I have no idea how I didn't realize how many samples she was missing.

The Original CV was a mess.

WHITE's original CV bank came with triphones. A very, very random amount of triphones that likely came from recording samples for one specific song. 

But boy howdy, did she absolutely master that song. 

The OTOs were a nightmare, so I started out by redoing them. The first thing I had to do, however, was add the filenames of the VCV to the aliases because UTAU's automatic CV to VCV feature only works with aliases. I standardized the OTOs for the VCV and set to work fixing the OTOs.

Then I realized the CV OTOs were also jacked up as heck. I prefer UTAU for VCV and SetParam for CV. The thing about UTAU, however, is that I can drag the window to make the waveforms bigger and easier to see. That's why I didn't realize I would need to process the samples to be louder until I opened up SetParam. So, I processed them. I also realized my copy of SetParam didn't have negative overlap. Whoops! Nearly every CV sample was cut so that there was no preceding silence, so not using negative overlap was impossible. Until I processed the samples and moved them over so that there was silence preceding the consonant! With the ability to include silence before plosives and louder samples, I quickly made work of the CV in SetParam.

Then I realized there were missing samples. A lot of missing samples. Most of them were palatalized consonants. Due to a prevalent misunderstanding of what those are, it was easy to fix that so that it sounded right to someone who doesn't know how those work. There were also really strange omissions like "he" and "be". Of course, I also made those and slapped them in there.

The main issue is that if you like that soft, no consonant sound, you will hate WHITE with proper OTOs. In addition to that, making them louder made the noise more obvious. (Also, I was tired and annoyed while doing half of the OTOs. Can't promise they'll be perfect.)

 That's why I'm including both the original CV and my remastered version. If you want to make your own versions of the missing samples and don't want to introduce noise, you can.

Click here for the original, and here for the remastered version.

The VCV is Awesome.

I was crazy about VCV, and WHITE's VCV has every sample required. For some reason, the bank also includes all of the CV from the original CV bank. They're not used at all thanks to how full VCV works, and there are still missing CV samples. 

However, the OTO is really jacked up for some reason. 

I basically had two options. The first option was to spend five hours of my life remaking the OTO entirely. The other was to praise Kanru Hua. Without Moresampler's autogenerating OTOs, I would have never been able to make this sample:

Using her in UTAU is a little disheartening because of all of the noise. However, when you mix her into a song, the static fades away.

I will warn you that the accent is strong. Ultra cute, but the "L"s are jarring when you're not expecting them. VCV means you can't OTO it to at least sound like a flap, but eh, that's part of the magic.

Unlike before where I uploaded two versions, I only uploaded one version of the VCV. I included the original OTO and the OTO Moresampler created. If you want to use the Moresampler OTO, delete the original and rename the other .ini file.

Download the WHITE VCV here.

Then there's mwhite.

Hidden away on the PSS website is the experiments page. At the very bottom, there's a place to download the experimental banks. The other two banks have a write up telling you about them. Nothing is said about mwhite.

What WHITE is depends on the day. Sometimes she's a Michiyo append, sometimes she isn't. This was the only version of WHITE available to download after mx deleted the 4616P channel. And . . . it's not exactly WHITE.

It's a simple, romaji encoded CV with + signs thrown in since I think this was meant to be an append for Michiyo.

The OTOs are really weird, ok. I don't know if it was a conscious choice or if it was just ignorance of how OTOs work. It was released in 2011. I always assumed MX would always be better than UTAU at me, so I downloaded the most recent Michiyo bank and stared at the wall for a few minutes. I tried to fix the OTOs but got fed up and just plug-and-played for the sample.

I wouldn't really suggest this bank in general. It lost that feeling WHITE gave me all those years ago.

That's about it!

I loved WHITE to an insane degree. I was just gutted when I realized I wouldn't be able to use her again and over the moon when I realized that I could. It just took taking a chance with my old laptop, and she's here again! I hope someone finds her and loves her as much as I did. 😃

Forgotten Friday #4 - Isaac E. Altermond - The OGG UTAU

Who is Isaac E. Altermond? How can a VCV bank be under 8 MB? Where can I download this bank?

Forgotten Friday #4 - Isaac E. Altermond - The OGG UTAU

Isaac E. Altermond is a case of an old Japanese man being begged to release an UTAU and then no one using it because who cares about random UTAUs by old Japanese men? (me. I did. I was a weird kid.) Yuuboku made some strange choices when he created Isaac, including the one I mentioned in the title. Isaac E. Altermond's voicebank is encoded in Ogg Vorbis. Ogg Vorbis is basically an opensource attempt to replace MP3 as the main way of encoding a lightweight audio file. There are claims that the compression of an Ogg file is less noticeable than that of MP3, but it's really just different kinds of noise and artifacts. 

The second odd thing was that the voicebank had a decoder included. That program converted the OGG to WAV with one click and made 2010 me feel like a 1337 hacker for using that big black window-thing.

I felt like a real smart Computer Person, ok

The reason for doing this has two explanations. The first objective fact is that the ZIP files aren't hidden behind a strange corporate scheme the way RAR files are, and 7z files require downloading 7zip. Using ZIP over the two options that require downloads means that the compression won't be that great. Even using the most compressed version of a RAR, the voicebank is still around 31 MB rar'd once converted back to WAV. The download Yuuboku provides with OGG files is literally 7.80 MB. That's as small as a normal CV bank!

The downside to that is that if you know the signs of Ogg compression, you'll spend a lot of time going "b'aw . . . it wouldn't sound like that if it were raw WAVs."

The second explanation is "Men, Am I Right?"

But what's coming up next is the real head-scratcher.

There is no design.

Sometimes it's hard to find official artwork, but you can usually open up a bank and get an icon to show up in the corner. Not this UTAU. 

Heck, even the place that usually holds all the answers (the Japanese UTAU wiki) let me down.

It means Page not Found

There's literally no design. Unless you want to be cheeky and say that his design is obviously on full display on his release video.

You could personally ask Yuuboku if you can design Isaac, or you could just make one and use it.

Why is everything in English??

The site to download Isaac is completely in English. The name was so Western I was trying to run down the list of old Western men in the fandom who may have made this bank until I scrolled to the bottom of the screen and saw Yuuboku's name. Even the distribution video is in English! But a stroll to Yuuboku's Twitter shows that he really only tweets in Japanese. What gives? 

No, seriously, I don't know why.

What is the bank like?

More important than the encoding of the files, lack of design, and excess of English is the bank itself. It's held back by the artifacts from the conversion process. It's a really good bank for 2010 when we hadn't fully mastered what makes the perfect recording methods.

Not perfect, but who was back then?

It's a full VCV bank and it sounds pretty darn good.

The OTOs may need a bit of adjustment and experimenting with resamplers and flags might get rid of that faint "ogg echo" that keeps me from really fawning over the bank. But the voice type itself is really nice!

I suggest it to anyone who wants to relive the magic of 2009 while using a full VCV bank. It's especially awesome for people with data caps, as it's the smallest full VCV bank download I've ever seen.

There are only two videos I know of on YouTube featuring Isaac. The first is the release video, and the second is a video of mine I'm keeping private (because I was really bad at mixing in 2010 and exported all my videos with maximum compression back then). Hopefully after reading this, someone will download him and put more videos of him up on YouTube!

QUROE's UTAUs - An Investigation

Who is Tsukimori Sasuke? How can I download Lamia Serpent? Who made 月森左佐?

QUROE's UTAUs - An Investigation

Let me start by saying that there was an UTAU library on my desktop that I didn't recognize. His name was 月森左佐. I had to look him up on the Japanese wikis to figure out the romanization, Tsukimori Sasuke. I remembered downloading it from a OneDrive, but I had no idea where it came from. The author was credited as "???". (Note, usually linking directly to a OneDrive is bad form, but this is the link that the author gives. There is no website.)

So it was up to me to just try and figure out what the heck was going on. Sasuke isn't a bad voicebank overall, but was a bit baffling for a bank from 2014. One pitch CV with vocal fry that fries most resamplers.

But where did he come from? The OneDrive was empty apart from that bank and two USTs. Well, I used the Imperial Parade UST's readme to track down the release video. And that's when my eyes got wide. 

Kurou . . . QUROE?! For those not up to date on my crazy UTAU adventures, QUROE was someone who I made a deal with. You record, I OTO your bank. For me, it was one of the best deals I ever made.
QUROE has taken down Lamia's VCV, but I still have a copy on my 4shared.

How I Found Sasuke

In researching for my Forgotten Friday articles, I go through a list of every UTAU released by release order and see if 1) the links work and 2) if the bank is forgotten by Westerners. I came across 瞬音フウ and saw the bank was no longer distributed. For a lark, I went to the NicoNicoPedia page anyway. To my surprise, a OneDrive was linked. And that's where I found Sasuke.

If I had studied my kanji harder, I would have recognized 神榊憑神. That was QUROE's old username for everything, including her YouTube. In addition to that, it's also what she set her name to on her old blog. I navigated to the blog by Googling Matatane Fuu. There wasn't much useful stuff there as QUROE's main push of UTAU content happened after 2010, when her blog became defunct. 

How many UTAUs are there?

According to the main page I use, 神榊憑神 released four UTAUs in 2009. Those UTAUs are not linked to her current UTAUs in any way except for Heta. 嘘歌ヘタ has both his Act 3 and Act 4 up for download.

Someone has taken down most of Heta's videos. When sorting by oldest, this video is the first.

 However, that video lists Heta's voice provider as someone other than QUROE. The next video with Heta at top billing is from 2011, when Heta's Act 3 was released.


The author of Heta's Act 3 is listed as QUROE. Especially in the omake (extra) files, Heta sounds a lot like Lamia. So I believe it's the same person for the later acts. I just don't know if Heta was transferred or if Mr. Loop got his wires crossed.

Heta was the first. According to the UTAU visual archive there are 12 more.

Released in November of 2010, 戦場軍人（Senba Gunji） has more CV banks than I think anyone really knows what to do with until Ameya releases his update that makes using multiple folders easier. Scroll down to "音源配布所" to pick out the banks you want to try. He sounds pretty good!



Released in May of 2011, 戦場軍師 (Senba Gunshi)'s release video has been removed. However, the description of the video stayed up along with the link to download him.

Official art from the UTAU Visual Archive

Released in July of 2011,  戦場チェーンソー is weird, ok.

Official Art from UTAU Visual Archive 

Why does a saw need two acts?? Download them here if you want to.

Also released in July of 2011 was the first female UTAU of Quroe's that is still online as far as I know. 戦場軍歌 or Senba Gunka was released with a VCV, but the link is dead. Only her CV banks remain. They can be downloaded on her NicoNicoPedia page. I absolutely love her design, and there's an MMD model for it.

Released in October of 2011, 也音トモ or Narine Tomo is another case of the video being pulled but the download link remaining up. Apparently, the voice provider for this bank was not QUROE and instead T也. I don't know who that is, but the readme gave QUROE's Twitter ID as QUROX. You can search it if you want to be really confused for a second before realizing changing your Twitter ID is pretty easy.

The voicebank itself is pretty good. It's a nice voice, but it's one pitch CV.

The main draw is definitely the design.

Official art packaged with bank
By QUROE

Also released in October of 2011 is 赤穂 or Akou. It was an instrument UTAU (accordion) and the link is dead.

Released in November of 2011 is Mikami. All of his download links are on his UTAU Visual Archive page. This was the last bank QUROE posted on her original YouTube channel.

His voice is very, very deep.

In May of 2012 there was a creepy headless UTAU and it creeped me out so I'm not writing about it. Here's the link. There's no gore or anything, it just creeps me out.

Released in August of 2012, 比良歌雅近 (Hiraga Masachika) is a grandpa.

Literally, his voice provider is QUROE's grandfather. It's a really nice bank for a "My family member doesn't really know what's going on but HERE WE GO!" bank. The download link is in the nicovideo I just plopped up there.

Downloading this bank brought to light a username that QUROE used at the time this bank was uploaded. "QUROWD L". Googling it pulled up this blog. However, luckily for me QUROE only configured those banks.

Another strange quirk is that she keeps making new email addresses and just adding a number to the end. She's up to three at this point.

oh and by the way, the voice provider has passed away. If that creeps you out, avoid this bank.

Released in November of 2013, there's a bank with a hate symbol in their name. The video is down, but the download link is still up. The bank I'm not talking about had a counterpart named 日ノ本譲  (Hinomoto Yuzuru). In the ReadMe, the author is listed as "黒野エージ" despite the video being uploaded by QUROE. Due to the upload site being a jerk, I can't download the one with a safe for work name. Moving on!

Released in September of 2015 is 穿刃グンジ or Senba Gunji . . . which is the same romanization as an earlier bank. He has a different voice provider and QUROE links to a bit of backstory on the video he was released on.

Official art from UTAU Visual Archive

As of this point, the site he was uploaded to is giving me trouble and I cannot download him to test him out or poke his readme file. However, he is over 60MB thanks to strong and soft versions of his samples. No samples of him singing exist at the time of writing as far as I know.

I wouldn't be shocked if there were more.

These UTAUs weren't all made by QUROE, but they were uploaded and distributed by her. When I approached her to make her VCV bank, I had no idea how much UTAU content she had made, nor how much she would go on to make. I honestly thought she left the fandom after making Mikami. I was wrong. I would love to find her and catch up with her, but I have no idea how to track her down. With the bulk of male UTAUs she has created, I'm not sure if she's the right word to use. Maybe he transitioned?

Either way, I was shocked at how many UTAUs there were connected to QUROE when I only thought there was one.

I usually try to think of a nice and hopeful way to sign off, but I'm just shocked.

- Mae

Forgotten Friday #3 - Inuhebi, the snake dog

Who is いぬへび? How can I download Inuhebi? What is Inuhebi even?

Forgotten Friday #3 - Inuhebi, the snake dog

Inuhebi is a compound word from "inu" for dog and "hebi" for snake.

Official Artwork Packaged with Bank

I remember hearing there was a Japanese fairy tale creature called Inuhebi, but all my Googling points back to the UTAU. His voicebank isn't bad, but it's nothing to write home about. It's a good CV bank.

The honest truth is that this is a case of nostalgia. That little snake dog was everywhere back in 2009. And for good reason! Look at this adorable MMD model!

Now here's the thing that blows my mind - Inuhebi was updated in 2014. That sample wasn't from a nostalgia trip from 2009 - it was actually from a bank from 2014! More amazingly, his creator, Inuhebi-P, is still active to this day.


I sent a Tweet to who I thought was Inuhebi-P asking if they wanted to record Inuhebi's VCV. It's late and my grammar was too poor to actually phrase the question properly. If Inuhebi gets a multipitch VCV, then surely everyone will remember and love the little snake dog, surely!

Where can I download Inuhebi?

Inuhebi's main page that is linked to on NicoNicoPedia is right here. Not only can you download the bank, you can also hear samples from every version on that page! The one I downloaded was "UTAU用いぬへびライブラリver0.41 8メガぐらい(2014年収録）" (yup! A pretty big mouthful!) 

Inuhebi has a cute voice, but for me it will always be the design that gives the UTAU a place in my heart. Memories of him hanging out with other ancient UTAUs in PVs will probably stay in my brain for years to come. He was the embodiment of wackiness in the earliest stages of UTAU. It was a design that was so simple, yet so unique. It's hard to find UTAUs with designs that have impacted me the way Inuhebi's has.

Hopefully, now that you know who Inuhebi is and where to find him, you'll love him too 😃

Imaka Sara / 今歌サラ - Almost a USloid, but not quite - Recovered!

Who is Imaka Sara? How can I download 今歌サラ? How was Sara Imaka recovered?

Imaka Sara / 今歌サラ - Almost a USloid, but not quite - Recovered! 

So, let me start with a story. Long ago, Tomero Chii was looking for a voice provider for a future UTAU. Her name was Imaka Sara. (I've been studying kanji and I keep thinking the more correct jukugo reading Konka sounds so much cooler.)

Official art packaged with the bank

I kind of signed up because I thought it would actually be difficult to make an UTAU. I was impatient so I bugged MX to teach me how to make an UTAU. She recorded a tutorial just for me and I was like "Naw, Imma make BLYTHE ANAKA!" (the name was a placeholder, by the way. I didn't intend for her to have that name, heh.) 

The reason the title calls Imaka Sara not quite a USloid is because Tomero Chii was the one facilitating the search for voice providers. However, neither Zander, Chii, nor Amy showed up in any of the documentation in the bank itself. Only a defunct deviantArt for MangaAddiction (who I assume was the artist) and Neibaku (the voice provider) were credited. As I said, MangaAddiction's dA is defunct. Using WayBack machine gives a link to his tumblr. Neibaku is easily found, but has been inactive for a year. I would message her to ask about the possibility of Imaka Sara VCV, but she's inactive. 

What does Sara sound like?

She sounds like 2009.

If you're in the mood for 2009 Overseas Hard R's, this bank is perfect. Also, I can't verify this for certain but I'm pretty sure she stole Momo's OTO, as was the fashion of the time.

Yeah, I'm not kidding. People had no idea how OTOs worked, so they stole Momone Momo's OTO file. That would explain why there are no multipitch samples, but Imaka Sara's OTO has lines for multipitch files.

There is not a single file with an Up Arrow in her bank.

Also, stealing Momo's OTO explains this:

Also as the fashion of everyone in Chii's vicinity in 2009, her samples are around five seconds long. I'm not saying that it's a bad thing, I'm just saying that it's really, really 2009.

Where can I download 今歌サラ?!

First, a warning. Her OTOs aren't good. They're really jacked up, and will need to be fixed. Maybe you can ask Rev to reOTO her and reup the bank with some cleaning. I know I was just USloid adjacent, but knowing how little of a flip Zander, Amy, and Chii give about UTAU now makes me say that you legit have their blessing to reupload this baby with modifications. 

Now that that warning is out of the way, you can find her bank by going to her UTAU Wiki page and going to the "Voicebank Distribution" section. Yes, it's reuploaded illegally. But as I said, no one involved cares.

I hope that finding Imaka Sara after nearly a decade makes at least one person happy! If not, I hope someone is at least amused that we thought stealing OTOs from Momone Momo was the right way to do things.

Forgotten Friday #2 - 雷歌ヒビキ / Raika Hibiki or HOW Is This So Forgotten?!

Who is Raika Hibiki? How old is Raika Hibiki? What is up with this awesome VCV?!

Forgotten Friday #2 - 雷歌ヒビキ / Raika Hibiki or HOW Is This So Forgotten?!

So, my rule was that if YouTube forgot about an UTAU, it is fair game. So, imagine the look on my face when I found this:

That is Raika Hibiki. And boy howdy! On YouTube, he doesn't seem that great. The most recent YouTube video as of writing is three years old, and I've already used it to disqualify Zakupo.

Who is Raika Hibiki? 

Released in November of 2008, Raika Hibiki is the 24th UTAU to ever be published. 

Image by 響P

As was the style of the time, he also had a Gender Bent version named Ibuki.

Image by ななしのよっしん

And there was a bit of a reason he got slept on.

Almost all of his oldest uses were just . . . off somehow? They reflected pretty poorly on the bank, which explains why he never became a Sora or Taya to Westerners despite newer banks blowing my mind.

Here's the super cool thing -

Not only is Raika Hibiki a multipitch VCV, there are several different versions. And this was all in and before 2010! With Ameya's new folder based alias system in the works, that means that these banks can be combined to make some awesome stuff! Seriously.

Usually, I post a SoundCloud sample of how the voice sounds. I honestly can't do it justice - scroll up and open up that NicoVideo link. I've tried embedding it but Blogger won't let me. It's legitimately mind blowing, though. 

How do I download his banks?

All links to the banks are hosted on the voice provider's blog. If your head hurts looking at tiny Japanese characters (hi, me too), all of the links are posted on his UTAU Wiki page. I think they're illegally posted there, but I'm not complaining when they made the text big enough to not hurt my head!

I hope someone falls in love with these banks and does them justice!