Forgotten Friday #75 - カステロイド / Castelloid

Okay so! I wrote a one thousand word video script that outlined the ideal UTAU plugin for English that requires the user to input all of the relevant data, but then automates the creation process. Since I finished the script (the read from kind, not the computer kind), I did come up with more important features to be added. I downloaded Delta's C# library for making UTAU plugins, but I got nothing but errors no matter what I did. Masao stepped in and told me to download Visual Studio 2017. I have to wait until free internet time, but hopefully that fixes it. (Lambda expressions! Who thought programming could change so fundamentally so quickly!)

Forgotten Friday #75 - カステロイド / Castelloid

Note on the name... My dyslexia works in mysterious ways sometimes. I can read hiragana front and back with no issues, but katakana kind of is blurry to me and it takes a lot of effort to read it. It isn't an issue of me just not learning katakana. It's just... really hard to read katakana. I always paste the readings of names into Google Translate to get the correct romaji reading. I had originally had the name as Casteroid as that's what Google Translate translated it as, but the file name for the bank is actually Castelloid. 

Who is Castelloid?

image from nicopedia

So, Castelloid is the collective name of three characters: Teira, Tiramisu, and Mashu. Each character is summoned by affixing the gender flag. Which is che. I really am not a fan of the gender flag, but this UTAU was released back in 2009. People weren't exactly recording several banks for each specific OC. 

Castella is a Japanese dessert. One of the first Western nations to open trade with Japan was Portugal. Notice how the name looks Latin? Well, supposedly the dish came from Portugal... but there is no Portuguese dish called castella. Tiramisu is another dessert, and Mashu comes from "marshmallow". Now, what is a Teira? Who even knows!

So, on the Nicopedia, almost all information on the characters is "???". The UTAU Visual Archive says that they are all women, but the Nicopedia doesn't know what gender any of them are. 

So, you know, this is a perfect opportunity to write a letter from the editor. So, you know those Little Debbie cakes? Hostess stuff? I can't stand it, but they help me so much. My depression is kind of kicking my butt in the sense that the inertia is insane and I have daily exhaustion. I could probably fix it by taking less meds... but one, I can't cut up extended release pills, meaning I would need to get prescribed a new dosage to start on that. And two, I am literally terrified of mania. I would rather be a zombie than a hedgehog. 

I was having my daily exhaustion, so I ate a snack cake and I was almost instantly okay. I had a horrible, pounding headache, so I ate a snack cake. I was almost instantly okay.

I try to eat healthy! I really do! But then I find out that just not somehow makes me feel okay when otherwise I'd feel really, really bad. Anyway, on to the bank itself.

How is Castelloid's bank?

So, word of warning. The archive I downloaded was corrupted, but it doesn't actually seem like anything was missing. I don't know if it was a problem with the uploader and all versions will be corrupted, or if I just had bad luck. If you notice me swapping samples, I'm doing it to save on data because data caps. 

This bank is a test bank. Should you use test banks and compare them to finished banks? Well, if the only bank that exists is a test bank, and the person who made it gives everyone permission to use the UTAU... The whole being a test thing is kind of moot.

The OTOs are very bad of course. It's a one off bank from 2009! What is strange, though, is the fact that the OTOs have decimals in them. I... don't remember when setparam, the only way to get decimals in the OTOs for a good while, was released.

I don't know if it's partially the tester UST I was using, but I absolutely love Castelloid. The recording quality isn't perfect, but that's kind of the charm of banks like this. The recording quality muffling the voice makes it sweeter and kinder. So, it has the super adorable cute voice... And, aside from "tsu" missing due to the corrupted archive and "i" being a little breathier, the bank is an absolute joy to use! No glaring issues that wouldn't be fixed by downloading the bank again (hopefully).

(And... This demo is trans lyrics I made for Simple Plan's "Untitled". I just thought it was a silly little bit of information.)

Where can I download Castelloid?

You can grab the bank from the UTAU Visual Archive page! The only reason I'm not keeping this girl around on my computer is because I would need to redownload her, and there are so many more banks to explore!

But I absolutely adore her, and I think many other people will too once they hear her.