Wiki Wednesday #198 - Ako Akoni

 my back is starting to hurt and I don't know why.

Wiki Wednesday #198 - Ako Akoni

Basically everything about this utau is based around an unreleased utau. Things that aren't are the fact that she loves to paint her nails, hates laundry, and has a fear of being alone.

Who is Akoni Ako?

Art from Wikia

"Supposedly" fictional Chia here.

One of the most interesting questions to me was how did the people of Borph eat before they were found by the Union? The answer was actually simple: when the colony was formed, they were given genetically modified plants. The plants contained all of the macro and micronutrients needed to live a very healthy life. They even tasted good, apparently!

They were all just vegan and had no interest in slaughtering animals.

The woman at the front desk, however, came from a more "normal" society where eating animals felt like a requirement. She reiterated that when the end product isn't a sapient species, evolution has no rules.

I asked if she had tried the animals on the moon. She gagged.

She started with the least offensive. Shoulder riders just don't have much meat. Their internal organs are more or less poison, and they barely have any muscles. Their bones are very sharp and hazardous, making it even harder to get any meat from them. The only use her team found for them was fattening them up to make lard, but the genetically modified plants made better oils.

She retched. She told me again that evolution didn't need rules. Likely, the orange scrounger was the entire reason that evolution halted. She had a blank stare as she told me that she had eaten plenty because her team was dead set on finding a way to make it stop making everyone throw up. Her team shipped the meat to all of their affiliates. They tried feeding it to animals. Nothing was willing to take a second bite without being promised that this time was different - they tried treating it with different chemicals this time! What kind of predator could survive when it couldn't stand to eat one species and the other could kill it?

The seas had more or less been replaced with puddles by the time the colonists showed up. All of the water was trapped in aquifers where fish couldn't live. They had fossils of the fish that eventually became the land creatures, but they were no edible fish left.

She was trying to take her mind off of the vile meat, but I was too curious to let it go. Even humans can be raised to like things that seem disgusting to other cultures. How wasn't there a single one that liked orange scrounger meat?

Again, she repeated that there were no rules. Orange scroungers created acids when they moved their muscles. That's normal, but what isn't normal is that they stored those acid in their muscles and fat. For what purpose? The only logical reason was so that nothing would eat them. The more acids they stored, the less likely they were to be killed. There was a theory that, with their acute sense of smell, the acids that people couldn't smell normally in a living orange scrounger were some kind of mating call.

The acids were vile. Maybe if it was just one, then there would be at least one being who enjoyed the meat. But there were several acids. As soon as the animal died, some of the acids would instantly begin to cause the meat to decay or encourage the growth of bacteria and parasites that would somehow burrow their way into the tissue.

There was something for every civilization and animal that signaled that the meat was rancid. Even scavengers like vultures refused to touch it.

I thanked her and apologized for making her so sick from remembering it. She laughed and thanked me for the apology. She was glad to share her data. 

How are Ako Akoni's banks?

So uh. She has a strange bank. In one folder there is a CV bank, a VCV bank, a copy of the same vcv bank, and a folder that just has one 40+ megabyte wav file as a demo.

The vcv otos are scary to look at.

boo

What is there to do when I'm on a tablet without my normal programs to fix this issue?! 

So, I'm going out of order here. Listen to this next sample. If you think it's just meh or not for you, you can leave now. But if you like it... I'll tell you what I had to do.

I whipped out the USB keyboard for this. Because boy howdy.

First problem - you want to auto generate the OTOs. If Moresampler has a problem with dashes, you can use a program to replace the dashes with either underscores or nothing. I don't think SetParam can handle automatic romaji VCV, but the program I used on my PC allowed csv sets of rules, so you could remove the dashes, run it through a romaji to hiragana converter, and then use those rule sets to have a nice set of files to automatically generate an OTO for. Maybe VLabeler could just handle it as it was!

Well, I didn't think to do any of that - what was I going to use - twelve notes? I opened the OTO in Notepad++ and went through and added the aliases I needed to the OTO, then opened UTAU and hahaha. 

First, the OTOs were so abhorrent, they literally crashed UTAU. Sometimes, I'd open a setting to edit and it would just be grey. The overlap and preutterance would be on top of each other and nothing but grey.

Then, on top of all that... Files were blank. Just a single horizontal line. But only in UTAU. Pop them into REAPER, Media Player, Ocenaudio... They were there. No problem at all! But in UTAU? (and by extension likely SetParam) Blank. Nothing. No sound. These were in what I assumed was an OREMO results folder, so how would the only thing I knew to cause this (is it resampling rates or bit rates?) be at fault here?

And, just an ease of access thing... The files were so baby quiet that I couldn't see anything when it did decide to show up in UTAU, which is extra why did this happen?

So I did something illegal. But why? Why spend two hours on this? (Sunk cost fallacy, but beyond that...) You heard that sample! The accent isn't the best, but the recordings are good. Even tone, even pitch, consistent, nice voice, blah blah blah. This is a good UTAU.. 

So, what did I do? I grabbed the samples I needed and slapped them into REAPER. Normalized items because I would go insane elsewise. I wanted to have the least pain possible, so I cut out each sample so that it was exactly what I needed. No bibibube here, only ibi. Named them the alias name.

Popped that into SetParam. Set alias name as %f then quickly set up the base OTO, then did the OTOs like it was just a normal bank. And then plopped it into UTAU and got that result! Was that worth two hours of work? If someone hears it and says "wow, I love this bank and will make it actually work!" then yes! If no one reads this because their reaction was "eh." Then... I... need to manage my time better. But if someone is willing to fix her! Then that would make it all worth it!

Also, she has a CV bank. The OTOs aren't great, but they don't crash UTAU.

Where can I download Akoni Ako?

If you want to try her out - whether it be to try and fix her VCV or to just enjoy her CV bank, you can find the download link on her Wikia page. I really think she's an awesome UTAU when she works, but oh my goodness - what it took to make her work!