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. 😃