Bonus Article! COY DE Act 2 and also Hifisampler!

 It would likely be extremely vain for me to say that COY DE Act 2 was created solely because I was rude in reviewing the original bank. But sometimes, it's fun to play pretend that your actions have an impact on the world. A cool UTAU getting an updated bank is an impact!

Also, I got Hifisampler working on my Windows 10 Virtual Machine. Why? UTAU doesn't work on Linux, I avoid Wine for some reason, and Windows 11 is way slower.

Let's start with Hifisampler. How did I get it to work? Well on Windows, first, you need to make sure you have the latest C++ redistributable. I downloaded and installed Python 3.10 just to be safe, but that's probably entirely pointless. Then you follow the instructions on the Github page of Hifisampler! And then you wait. And wait. For the thing to load up. But then it will say it is listening and you can use it!

Now, as you may remember, OG UTAU for life. So how am I using Hifisampler?! Everyone surely thinks of it as an OpenUtau thing!

In the project properties tab where you choose the singer, you are able to choose the resampler and wavtool for just that one project by changing Tool 2. (Please ignore the fact that my desktop is a OneDrive file path. I disabled OneDrive... And I would never store things on the desktop on a computer I thought of as real!) I also have the wavtool set to wavtool4vcv. I put it in the hifisampler folder to just.... exercise free will. But there is no wavtool that comes with hifisampler! You need to supply your own or use the default.

Now, if you always want Hifisampler, here's how you do that. Up at the top go to Tools (T) and then choose Options (O). Within the Option window, replace the current paths with the paths to your tools of choice. Save and bam! Every time you open a project, clicking "Initialize Tools" will set the path you had input! If you mess up, you can just click one button to go back to the defaults.

Now! The article was supposed to be about COY DE! Here is the original article if you are interested! 

COY DE Act 2 is a stringed CV bank. I'm always grateful when stringed CV banks are recorded in the way that this one is. There is a pause between every sample so that I never have to be upset that the bank was just this close to being CVVC! The OTOs feel very strange, but OTOs can always be fixed! The samples are of good quality and recorded with a consistent tone. There are no kana aliases, but eh. My Virtual Machine actually can't type in Japanese and I have a plugin that converts hiragana to romaji. 

Though... Does Hifisampler actually ignore the intensities of notes?! What is the point of a realistic resampler if one of the most important parts of realism is missing?!

Anyway. I fixed it with one line :)

At the time of writing, around line 926 of hifiserver.py add "        render = render * (self.volume / 100.0)" so it is all like:

        render = render / scale

        render = render * (self.volume / 100.0)

        new_max = np.max(np.abs(render))

All fixed :) ! Much better!

There is a certain irony in being shown that no one actually cares about note intensity! Anyway! COY DE is sounding lovely! If you want to try him out, you can get him from his website. 

Here's a note on Hifisampler: my concept of slow is really different than a lot of people. I'm thirty-something. I've been using computers since uh... Well, my mom tells me that before I could even read, I was sitting at the computer and controlling it with the keyboard. I have no memory of not being able to read, so you know, a long time. Now, that actually doesn't explain why I'm so tolerant of running hifisampler on a Windows virtual machine on an Obama Era Optiplex with integrated graphics.

I just tend to get cheap hardware. That's really it. If you know about my entire computer ecosystem, you might be confused. Not always. But in general, I try to only buy things that are, well, cheap. For the Optiplex, that works great. This thing is fast on Linux. But I'm on my second Windows Tablet. That thing is slow. But do you know what my first Windows tablet was like? It was pain. My first mini PC? Slower than the tablet. So by not knowing the "just buy an Optiplex" hack, I was using UTAU at speeds that would make a time traveler from 2009 ask if my computer was okay. So is Hifisampler fast or slow? lol. You can't ask me... It's just.... a speed that I do not resent. 

But... I said from the beginning that I was going to show off the true nature of banks by always using the default resampler. But ya know what? Let's have fun and just... use hifisampler.

EDIT!

So uh... I have said that I'm actually deaf to pitch in a way that feels different from normal tone-deafness. Maybe my brain was just skipping because I didn't realize that there were just... no pitchbends.

Here is the sample with intensity AND pitchbends!