Wiki Wednesday #319 - Saiko Kutane / サイコクタネ

 so... Tired... But I've done nothing!

Wiki Wednesday #319 - Saiko Kutane / サイコクタネ

Saiko is an internet famous sixteen year old boy who streams himself playing simulation and rhythm games on Twitch.

Who is Kutane Saiko?

Upscaled Art from Bank 

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I don't get the hate for Praat. So, back before I was born, a team at a university created Praat. Praat is FOSS: free open source software.

This means that you can download the source files and just do whatever you want. I'm not great at computers, so I won't do that. But if you are, you could just do whatever you wanted.

Even if Praat was closed source, there is a lot you can do with just scripts. For example, Hataori-P just straight up created a singing synth that uses Praat as a GUI. That was without him recompiling anything - that's just how powerful Praat is. 

For my own purposes, I was able to borrow code and cobble together a really cool workflow for labeling for Diffsinger and even creating UST files. My latest project was creating the dynamics curve for a USTx file so that English singing could be easily understood. I had to draw diagrams to actually translate my ideas to code, but it took basically no time at all compared to what I was fearing! I'm even considering cutting OG UTAU out of the mix by figuring out how to generate the pitch curve in Praat. The only reason I'm hesitating is because I still can't hear pitch and will need to do a lot of testing to make sure it works correctly. (Besides, pitch bends that UtaLis gives us are easier to edit.)

For Diffsinger labeling purposes, it's really easy. Using a script allows me to slot in the phoneme labels all at once. If there's a mistake at any point (which there usually is - I am a madman when placing my initial boundaries), I just run the script and all of the text labels are placed in again - this time hopefully correctly!

I am fully open to being corrected, but I feel like there's no other software used for labeling that lets you bulk import the text for each individual label from a text file.

The importing from a text file is extremely important to me. I never write out phonemes by hand. Even for Japanese, I use a converter for hiragana and find and replace for romaji. If there's an error in that output, I just need to edit the text file and then run the import labels script once again. 

Also, you can zoom in really close. When I tried zooming into VLabeler as closely as I zoom into Praat, the charts are too blurry! And I can't see the formants at all!

I get Praat not being popular. But I still don't get all of the hate. It works extremely well. If the color scheme bugs you, Windows has color blind filters that actually make Praat really easy on the eyes. If you need Dark Mode, Windows has an inverted color filter.

I'm open to hearing comments about what shortcomings Praat has, but like, maybe it's just trendy to hate it in the fandom.

How Are Saiko's banks?

Seiko actually has five CV banks packaged into one big bank. I'm going to add suffixes to use them all together.

Saiko has a lovely voice with good variation amongst his different appends.

Where can I download Kutane Saiko?

You can find him on his wiki page. He is a nice utau!