Wiki Wednesday #41 - skuidd's wallows

I utterly and completely dislike Arpabet, but I understand completely why it is how it is. I'm not mad about the intuitive design that allows people who don't understand phonemes to see how it works in a sense. The reason I really dislike it is my dyslexia, and that's a me problem. But it's a good system that I dislike due to my own mental handicaps. I have other issues with Arpasing in general, but using it isn't complete torture like other systems. 

Wiki Wednesday #41 - skuidd's wallows

Why does this UTAU have no YouTube videos?! Why is skuidd's dA completely and utterly wiped?? When someone deletes their account, that's one thing. When they go through and delete every single thing on there? That's a different thing. The answer is that skuiid got a new dA account. She is insanely good at art, so I'm really glad she has an account with all of her awesome deviations on it. That doesn't explain, however, why she hasn't posted a single video of Wallows on her YouTube channel. I do get that her channel is mostly speedpaints, but she does have UTAU videos regardless of that!

Anyway, sometimes life doesn't give you answers.

Who is wallows?

Official Icon Packaged with Bank

Wallows is so pretty!! I love her design. I love her color scheme. I love her outfit and her tattoos. Is there one thing I dislike? I don't think that haircut would look good on me, but it looks great on her! (But, that's literally only an issue if I were to cosplay her!)

She is a twenty-two year old woman who is 5'6''. Her character item is snakes. (Danger noodles!!) I mean, I could write out everything in her ReadMe and on her UTAU Wiki page but... Does anyone actually enjoy that? "Here's a list of adjectives!" The adjectives are over there without any research needed! I'm just so hype about this design.

How are her banks?

Wallows has two banks. She has a one pitch Arpasing bank and a one pitch, romaji encoded VCV. 

Now, let me be pretty clear. You literally cannot expect a user to do an Arpasing bank using an index and naming their files as numbers to actually do their VCV OTOs. That would be absurd! They let Moresampler autogenerate their Arpasing, so why not also their VCV? Well, I thought I'd never use it, but I'm pulling out the Java program I wrote to fix her VCV OTOs to something that doesn't sound icky.

And my program didn't work because of a floating point exception. Well, okay. I'll just do it in LibreOffice Calc then. I literally had to watch one of my old videos to figure out how to do it. I'm really out of practice. Something went wonky and completely messed everything up - I think it was that there were some things missing that shouldn't have been? I don't know, but I'm pushing on, even if I have to edit everything by hand because this voice is worth it.

Well, it was until "u ゆ" showed up in a sample named "dyu_dyu_di_dyo_dya_dyo_di". All I can really do is either completely regenerate it and then fix that, or just cut my losses with a two second sample. I won't be myself for a moment and do the easy thing for once.

Her voice is really good, but this was a lot of work just to get to this point, and I don't know how it even got to this point.

Her English bank is a lot better configured, but it has some issues. I had to use the wrong sample in a few places because "s ah" was recorded incorrectly.

I much prefer Japanese in UTAU, but the English was a lot easier to use. And, I really love this UTAU's voice!! So the work on the English was really fulfilling. I put in the work and got a really pretty sound.

How can I download Wallows?

Her download links are on her UTAU Wiki page. As for her English, the way it is set up is a little annoying to me. The index system obscures what phonemes are in each line, you can't be promised full coverage, and there are some errors that can only be fixed really by using the wrong phonemes. If I were to get back into really using UTAU, I do think I'd use her English after converting the aliases from Arpasing to VOCALOID phonetics. (I complete forgot I wrote a program to do that!)

The Japanese VCV doesn't have the same issues, but will require a complete redo of the OTO file. I rarely throw in the towel, but I had to for this bank. I love the voice and I love the design, but so much work.

I don't know how this UTAU doesn't have videos with thousands of views on YouTube... Or I just described why this UTAU doesn't have videos with thousands of views on YouTube.

I want to make it completely clear, I love everything about this UTAU except the problems I ran into. All of the problems can be fixed or mitigated with time. I don't have time these days, really. So, I do love this UTAU, and I hope other people find out they love her also.