Forgotten Friday #22 - 筑紫野スイム / Chikushino Swim
This is another case of swearing I should know this UTAU, but then having no memory of it at all. She has been used a few times by overseas users, but rarely and all over five years ago.
As late as 2014, the character has had some attention to say the least. Swim does have an MMD model.
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| Image Used to Promote Swim's MMD model |
I have no idea. There's very little information on this UTAU in Japanese, and virtually none in English. Usually I would go out and search for all of the information possible, but I'll just leave it at the fact that she is probably in her early teens and she has an unnamed gender-bend.
Her voice provider has an abandoned blog, but Googling the voice provider's name as given by the readme file ("鳥類総括") came up with nothing of real use.
There is a real chance this UTAU was abandoned and discontinued. The download page was taken down years before Geocities was taken offline for good. But at this moment, that can't stop me because I can't read!
How are the banks?
Swim has two banks that are available for download: Swim1 and Swim2. Swim1 was recorded in 2009 and is a three pitch CV! Sadly, the three pitches do not work with the automatic assignment feature as the suffixes are not in the aliases. This doesn't take long to fix, however.
Simply open the bank and OTO in SetParam and open a copy of the OTO in a text editor. Once that is done, open your favorite spreadsheet program (LibreOffice Calc works great and is free!). Copy the OTO in its entirety and paste it into the spreadsheet. Hopefully, you will get a dialogue box asking how you want it formatted. There should be an option to choose a character that will cause the lines of text to be split into separate columns. Choose ".". Once you do that, you'll be able to copy the column with the file names and copy them. Paste that into the alias column of SetParam and save the OTO. You'll be ready to go!
After that bit of effort, I have learned that this bank is perfect and I love it and I wish I knew about it years ago. The microphone quality is superb. The consistency of tone is beyond mind-blowing. It sounds perfect in almost every single way.
Swim2 is another three pitch CV, though this one was recorded in 2011. Again, you will need to edit the OTO to be able to automatically have the up and down arrows applied. From a first glance, it's hard to understand why in the heck this bank was made. Due to the fact that the OTOs are wonky, it sounds really glitchy and unfinished whereas the previous bank sounded perfectly polished.
Swim2 has a barely noticeable shift in tone that makes it sound less like a 2009 UTAU and more like a modern UTAU. It's silly to say that as that's literally what happened, but that's the only way I can think of to describe it. Swim1 doesn't have as much expression and warmth to her voice as Swim2 does. Mind you, these OTOs are really wonk.
Where can I download 筑紫野スイム?
WARNING. This UTAU may be discontinued and by using it you may be going against the wishes of the voice provider. I didn't do a deep dive - I only know that the link is dead and the only way to access it is via the WayBack Machine.
If you are willing to possibly go against the voice provider's wishes, here is the link. It would take an email in my inbox from the voice provider for me to not use this UTAU because oh my goodness. This is one of those UTAUs where VCV might not even improve the UTAU at all. Three pitches of perfectly recorded CV?!
I hope more people get into CV using this girl. She is the best.
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