Ooh, this is such a great idea!
I think most of Utaforum knows by now I'm a huge VCCV advocate and I have been from the very beginning. The amount of recordings and otoing doesn't bother me very much at all because I know the results that VCCV brings, alongside ease of use. I think arpasing is alright but at the same time I don't think it's fair to totally discredit the years of work Cz has put into making VCCV(she's been at it since at least 2010, I've done research). She wanted UTAU to sing in English and she made it possible. I'm definitely a fan of her work, because it's English UTAU that got me to make a voicebank at all. VCCV is really easy to use, though that's probably because of the amount of work I've done with it. I have no problem at all forming words or using it, but arpasing is like a foreign land; so foreign in fact that I had to use Cz's phonemes on the
arpasing phoneme site to even begin to try creating a bank. Like, "ay" in arpasing doesn't look like Cz's "I" to me. It looks like "A", and that's exactly what I'd say. This is true for many other samples. OTL
I hope VCCV remains as a popular method of doing English. I don't think arpasing is bad or anything, I think it's a great stepping stone for people interested in getting into English, but I also find arpasing....
sort of lower quality in terms of pronunciation? Not that it's bad. I'm aware that it's still really good but I can't help but hold it to a lower standard than VCCV. It feels lazy I guess, since a lot of people don't get farther than the moresampler generated oto. Myself included because I don't know exactly how to oto it.
My UTAU, TYPE A, was meant to only be English. Because, as someone who only speaks English, I really don't hold interest in making another Japanese UTAU that I could only ever use for covers. So my boy is getting a massive update to his English. It's currently in the works, though I tend to procrastinate a LOT so I have no idea when I'll be done.
I thank Cz for her VCCV magic everyday tbh.