UTAU is a program which was developed to use wave files to simulate singing.
Background
The development of UTAU started when Ameya began to use Audacity to recombine samples of other singers, and Melodyne to pitch correct the samples and set them to music. Because by hand this took a substantial amount of time and effort, Ameya began to develop a new tool which would aid the process. It was said that this program was developed as an "answer" to the very-expensive VOCALOID software. However, the number of available languages has been expanded by the users. English is a common language for UTAU to sing in. While there are a high number of bilingual UTAU, there are also multilingual UTAU that can sing in three or more languages. Regardless of the voice's language, a user's computer must be in the Japanese locale or use AppLocale in order to run the software. Most of its documentation is in Japanese, but the User Manual has been translated into English
UTAU allows the user to insert their own voice into the database for use for music, opening the doors for users to further develop their own music.
Initially, the program came with only a sample voicebank, then only known as "Default". It gained popularity parallel to what VOCALOID had with Miku, with Teto's arrival to the UTAU scene. From there, many voicebanks were created.
At first, UTAU was subpar to VOCALOID in terms of singing quality, but the author began developing the capabilities to the program until it became a viable substitute. For example, by 2010, the UTAU software was capable of supporting both triphones and software plug-ins; both of which were not included in the capabilities of the Vocaloid software until the Vocaloid 3 version was released in October 2011.
Technical Information
UTAU is programmed in Visual Basic 6, and is encoded in UTF-16. It has provisions for localization, and is currently a closed-source software.
Accessories
- UTAU Voicebanks, personified as UTAUloids
- OREMO, a phoneme coding guide software aimed for UTAU voicebank making
- UtaUtaUtau's plugins/scripts, applications developed to make processes easier
UTAUloids
UTAUloids are names for the many different voicebanks used for UTAU. There are many UTAUloids, as more are created every week by YouTube and Niconico users.
A list of UTAUloids can be viewed here.