Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-53539-20180209105421/@comment-53539-20180210002619

The process of doing that requires further development which means that Plogue has to focus on it again... They are not working on it and one contribution to that is the hassle they've had.

A/E can actually support a variety of synth methods, as it is the same engine as the Chipspeech one. A/E was suppose to be their way of expanding on the Chipspeech engine and its pretty much backfired on them. Because of the Chipspeech connection, it makes it hard for them to give into the idea of doing that. For this reason I don't think its a good idea in this case, as they will loose control over their own engine. Also, because of the fact most people won't realise this, it will just be used for similar things, and won't really have its full potential explored.

In due respects, the majority of UTAU vocals are fluff or filler vocals with not much quality or don't push UTAU to show off what it can do. This leads to it eing viewed as a "Meh" software to those in Vocaloid.

With Pligue having full control over A/E there is a good chance most vocals will have a standard quality, which once you make it open source will cease. You will get a similar situation to UTAU wherein good quality vocals are few and far between. Its the same with Vocaloid, while Yamaha controls vocaloid, the overall standard of vocals is far greater then if it didn't have that control. The only reason UTAU works at times is due to the overall sheer number of vocals provided, there is a increased chance there is a good vocal produced. However, they are largely overshadowed and rare, and tend to be overshadowed by popular vocals regardless of quality; something that occurs already in Vocaloid with certain members of the Big 8.

Whether or not you like it, I feel Plogue's decision was for the best of their concerns, as they have more to loose in this case then they have to win. And if Azuraflux's actions are anything to go by, things will get worst for them if they let their software become open license.

Even if they do continue to work on it, if they don't earn money back who is going to maintain servers or even certain other related resources? Think of the cost to maintain a server alone so people can download it... I don't think they ever intended to do this for charity, and were doing it to sell it as a licensed property like Yamaha do with Vocaloid. With Azuraflux now abusing his position of influence and trust, perhaps even it true that he is stealing money from them they should have received... Well... Frankly the cost to develop it and hiring coders isn't going to work out if this is a regular occurrence.

In fact the worst thing that can happen is they make it open source, giving people like Azuraflux the "okay" to go to town and continue to abuse the system. We don't tend to come across it much with UTAU, but most seem to be doing it for free or because they are a 1 person dev. Whereas this was suppose to be a product that vocals could be sold with. Though one good thing I would see of it going open source would be that if you have dozens of freeware vocals, there is less chance of people milking money off of people. This already occurs in UTAU, the few sold vocals don't usually see much overall use outside of Japan. Even then... UTAU has 1/5th the users, I don't see A/E getting that many users either. I could be wrong, but its obscurity is the biggest factor here.

UTAU was freeware always to begin with, and this meant it isn't the same. But even then, he ceased production in 2013 and is sitting there subject to software rot until the day comes a OS update occurs or a coding update and then it will break it. EVen if it survives that one, sooner or later its going to occur. As a living software, Vocaloid will survive a little longer then UTAU and has more chance to be with us in 30 year time, providing Yamaha continues to produce more versions and companies make more vocals. Whereas in 30 years time, we may not even hear of UTAU.

I'd rather they work on Chipspeech and continue to develop the engine in its fullest way, creating new ways of showing synthised vocals within the restrictions of it (which basically in terms of synth, are endless), then them to produce A/E to be the next UTAU. A/E should have been something wonderful, but D Smolken was prob. the only one I felt took the entire thing serious until the end with the intention to deliver a reliable professional product.