Weird popping sound on certain notes that I can't get rid of

[praisethelamps]

I’m working on a Sagawa Kiki cover of Literary Nonsense, but in just a few spots, there’s a weird popping sound that occurs. Here's a recording of what I'm talking about:

[Video]

(I use UTAU-Synth, but if you don’t have any UTAU-Synth specific advice about this, just tell me whatever you would tell an UTAU user experiencing this. A lot of the time, it’s still helpful to me!)

When I listen to them in the voicebank configuration settings, they all sound fine, no popping sound there. (Idk if that's relevant at all, but it's something I noticed, so I included that info just in case lol.)

Things I’ve tried adjusting to fix it (with zero success): ConVel, BRE, mod, gFlag, preutterance, overlap, P flag. There’s no vibrato on it, and I tried turning off the other flags I have on it, but the sound is still there.

Admittedly, I’m not the best with preutter, overlap, and flags (I am extremely new to this). However, I did assume that the problem could be solved with preutter and overlap settings, as a few similar weird sounds were fixed that way, so I did spend quite a while adjusting those.

 

[YKKUN]

Checked the vb, and for 'a こG4' its an frq issue as seen below.


It's an easy fix, as well as a common problem in multi-pitch vbs( in my experience, since it's harder and more time-consuming to check every. single. sample. for minute problems like this )

But I can't see an obvious frq problem with 'o もG4'. I'm not familiar with USynth, so I'm not sure if that ancient problem of not being able to use various resamplers is still relevant( I'd hope not ), but either way I'll ask; What resampler are you using?

 

[praisethelamps]

Checked the vb, and for 'a こG4' its an frq issue as seen below.
View attachment 12254

It's an easy fix, as well as a common problem in multi-pitch vbs( in my experience, since it's harder and more time-consuming to check every. single. sample. for minute problems like this )

But I can't see an obvious frq problem with 'o もG4'. I'm not familiar with USynth, so I'm not sure if that ancient problem of not being able to use various resamplers is still relevant( I'd hope not ), but either way I'll ask; What resampler are you using?

Ah, thank you for taking the time to download the voicebank and check it, that's very kind! I'm still using the default resampler...As far as I've found, there aren't any others that can be used with UTAU-Synth Though, the most recent post I saw saying that there weren't was from 2014, so I'm gonna do some more digging to see if that's changed. I might also try again to install UTAU with Wine. Can I ask how you'd go about fixing it if I was able to use them?

 

[YKKUN]

Ah, thank you for taking the time to download the voicebank and check it, that's very kind! I'm still using the default resampler...As far as I've found, there aren't any others that can be used with UTAU-Synth Though, the most recent post I saw saying that there weren't was from 2014, so I'm gonna do some more digging to see if that's changed. I might also try again to install UTAU with Wine. Can I ask how you'd go about fixing it if I was able to use them?

Ah, actually, doing a bit more research it looks like Synth users are out of luck editing frqs. But if you manage to bypass the hell that is MacOS, frqeditor is a 3rd party program by nmasao (iirc?) that allows you to edit frqs. I'm not the best at explaining, but it's a very straight forward program, and there's likely tutorials that exist for it.

Since it's not an easy fix for Mac, here is the G4 ko_ko_n_ko_ka_ko_ki frq that you can (hopefully) just drop into the G4 folder in Kiki's vb, overwrite the existing one, and no longer have the popping issue on this particular sample.

 

[Halo]

It may cause more problems than ones it fixes, but for intermediate~advanced users you can also try OpenUtau. While you still can't use wavtools on mac, you CAN use more resamplers via patching and you might be able to at least regenerate frequency files if this comes up again. There's some unfortunate phasing issues that persist, so do go in expecting a new different kind of odd engine noise sometimes, but at least a different toolset to use for cases like this.

Thank you for going the extra mile to help out, YKKUN!

 

[praisethelamps]

Ah, actually, doing a bit more research it looks like Synth users are out of luck editing frqs. But if you manage to bypass the hell that is MacOS, frqeditor is a 3rd party program by nmasao (iirc?) that allows you to edit frqs. I'm not the best at explaining, but it's a very straight forward program, and there's likely tutorials that exist for it.

Since it's not an easy fix for Mac, here is the G4 ko_ko_n_ko_ka_ko_ki frq that you can (hopefully) just drop into the G4 folder in Kiki's vb, overwrite the existing one, and no longer have the popping issue on this particular sample.

Ah, I typed up a response to this days ago, and apparently never hit "post" LMAO... whoops

But, thank you again! Dropping that file in unfortunately didn't seem to do the trick, but I'm going to look into frqeditor and see what I can work out with it. It seems like that's going to be really useful in lieu of plugins. Either way, at least understanding what's going on is really helpful to me, so I really appreciate your advice!

Post automatically merged: Aug 6, 2023

It may cause more problems than ones it fixes, but for intermediate~advanced users you can also try OpenUtau. While you still can't use wavtools on mac, you CAN use more resamplers via patching and you might be able to at least regenerate frequency files if this comes up again. There's some unfortunate phasing issues that persist, so do go in expecting a new different kind of odd engine noise sometimes, but at least a different toolset to use for cases like this.

Thank you for going the extra mile to help out, YKKUN!

That's good to know! I'm definitely excited to get into OpenUTAU once I've gotten a decent handle of USynth, it seems like a great resource

 

[Kiyoteru]

It might actually be easier to start with OpenUtau since there's a lot more that gets handled automatically. The advanced features are more like "room to grow", than something you need to prepare for by learning how to use an older editor first.

 

[praisethelamps]

It might actually be easier to start with OpenUtau since there's a lot more that gets handled automatically. The advanced features are more like "room to grow", than something you need to prepare for by learning how to use an older editor first.

Oh, is that so? I'll give it a shot soon, in that case!