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!