📝 What you should know about Mac UTAU
Hello everyone, Ecron here. Before we begin, this post is done purely for insight and entertainment purposes only, and whether some details be inaccurate that is due to the flaws in my memory. There is no target demographic for this post and will serve as a means of documenting the developments of Mac UTAU. Whether you are a Mac user who is just starting, an intermediate user who is blissfully unaware, or a Windows / Linux user curious about Hakken's foot in the thumbnail.
I have been here for 9 years and would love to tell you about it. The purpose this blog is to serve as an archive for users to make their Mac experience more streamlined, research being my hobby. My journey began on UTAU-Synth back in 2017, and gradually learned about the features that UTAU2008 had, that MacOS UTAU users on UTAU-Synth did not. So when OpenUtau released, that's when opportunities started to present themself in a open source software for UTAU.
In this post, I am going to talk about what we had, what we needed, when we got it, and how my research normally goes. It will be in and out of order, I don't think I have been this disorganized before, simply being a conversation. Before we continue, I would like to thank those who assist my research as this is just journalism at the end of the day. I am an archiver, not the unarchiver. I couldn't do it without you !
You have 1 option, it is UTAU-Synth, and not a bad option at all!
UTAU-Synth was the Mac version of UTAU2008, releasing back in 2011, 3 whole years after the release of UTAU. It was missing some core features, which, I believed we would never receive.
Your only resampler was fresamp (allegedly), few plug-ins such as the Oma☆Kase Editor, Surfix-Prefix editor (Yes, there is a typo, don't worry about it), and "Changing Volume" also accompanies the "Tools" menu.
The Oma☆Kase editor was a tool for editing envelopes, note speed, and overlap. To bring up the note properties you would type, ( K ) to bring up the note properties panel. Here you can edit your flags, volume, pitch, vibrato and envelope. You had your bare bones features that made for a decent UTAU experience, and I was pretty content.
If you wish to try UTAU-Synth after reading this post, I recommend saving your projects frequently, it is not optimized for newer versions of MacOS and is very prone to crashing. Unlike UTAU2008, your license expires after 30 days, and every 30 days you would have to renew your license. Here is my license, I have 21 days before I have to renew it at the "UTAU-DMV."
The reason why UTAU-Synth was kept to simplicity is because UTAU has always been contributed to by its user base. Most of it's users were developing on Windows, and there is really no way to run resamplers, plug-ins, and wavtools without some sort of emulation. This was daunting to users who only had a Mac as emulating on Mac can be confusing or tedious.
Now, if you wanted the fuller experience back in the day, people would generally recommend emulating UTAU2008 with Wine. Running your resamplers through wine, and your plug-ins through Wine, the whole experience would be emulated, which, is why I believe that most sources recommending emulation are a bit dated. For my tutorials, my main goal is to keep most of your tasks on MacOS. Some may resort to using a virtual machine, but those also tend to be complicated to some degree and require decisions of, "How much storage on your system would you wish to allocate?" It just becomes a problem in the future that I didn't want to contemplate.
When my tutorials feature Wine and Homebrew, I am still trying to keep it as simple as possible for the user, keeping emulation to a minimum, and explaining it in a way that is easy to follow.
OpenUtau was released as of August 21, 2021, as an open source singing synthesis program for multiple operating systems. Being cross platform, I was very excited for the release of OpenUtau, but, I was not as ambitious as I was today. In fact, I was daunted so I remained content with the features we were given at launch. Looking back, I was just excited to have another resampler (Worldline) that wasn't the default to UTAU-Synth. It wasn't until 2024 I became a bit more ambitious with UTAU after realizing, all my old questions from forum threads were left unanswered. This was my general calling to start researching and archiving information. Now that we had OpenUtau, these things weren't impossible, with cross platforming, it would be a larger community of users to inquire.
The history of OpenUtau's MacOS developments is going to be simply what I recall. In the beginning I do believe it was always possible to run resamplers on MacOS. In my initial impression, I found a lot of the resources at the time to be vague, and added a bunch of troubleshooting notes to mine. Being concise, and walking the user through every step so that they can compare and contrast. So I humbly remind the audience, this was, and still is, a learning experience for me. As I build these resources, I want to build them with user input and testing to make sure I do not miss anything. There is testing to be done for the people who are all still here, with me.
Aside from resamplers, I do believe what we didn't have for the longest time was wavtools, this was recently patched as of 9/20/25, in this tutorial.
Tutorial ▶︎ https://keitaiware.tumblr.com/post/795232450394587136/resamplers-on-openutau-v015650-for-macos
Otherwise, the program has always been a flexible experience for being open sourced.
Though, through testing and working through the kinks, I have to fight against the force that is the Apple. Apple has made habit to release a new OS every year to maintain the interest of its consumers. They are making sure it is exciting for all its users, but myself. As a Mac user of 13 years and counting, I must say these cause the most dilemmas in my research, but I remain a Mac user (with hobbies) for my comfort and expectations of this OS. That being said, my tutorials will inevitably experience becoming dated against my will. Especially in the case of components such as Wine and Homebrew end user support for certain versions of MacOS.
Before we continue, I would also like to make note that, Intel and Silicon systems are two completely different subjects. Both have different install locations, which, makes my tutorials separated into two different groupings. I used to make my tutorials on a 2019 Intel chip iMac, which was very lovely, but, retired this computer of mine as most developers have fully switched to supporting MacOS Silicon, or ARM. Which, makes using a Intel Mac difficult in our current era.
(OpenUtau still has Intel installers as of typing this, so fear not.)
Now with everyone understanding our current climate, I can now talk about how this effects the UTAU experience. As of a recent announcement of last year, I retired my old Intel chip iMac and replaced it with a M4 Silicon Macbook pro. This means I too, will no longer be adding Intel support for my tutorials, but if need be, I have more than enough knowledge to continue supporting Intel users in troubleshooting. Though, depending on the era of your Intel Mac, we also understand that with every update to your operating system, the system becomes more fatigued, which is why I had to retire my previous system. This begins my biggest gripe with Homebrew ending support for older OS and only support Sonoma, onward. Unless you have MacOS Sonoma installed on your Intel system, I believe it is quite impossible to follow most of my tutorials.
I do not control the rate at which developers hammer intel users, but I will continue making resources for UTAU on MacOS and helping every user to the best of my ability. Before we completely leave this topic, I would like to talk about the Silicon experience as of 2025-present, as this too has been developing since the purchase of my new system. Before on Intel, you could run resamplers by creating a Shell file. For context on how this functions I plugged the Intel tutorial below.
Resamplers (Intel) ▶︎ https://keitaiware.tumblr.com/post/766063532617973761/resamplers-on-macos
Though, because this process was originally optimized for Intel, Silicon installs a Intel bridge program in Terminal called, "Rosetta." Which, would double the render times by 2-15 minutes depending on your resampler.
This was a nightmare and I begged people for a solution for a few weeks and ultimately went on a hiatus for 2 months. That was until the update for OpenUtau 0.1.565, where it added a direct path from Wine to OpenUtau which eliminated the need for Rosetta, and render times were normalized.
At this point in my research, I can confidently say the MacOS experience is up to par with Windows, at the cost of a few extra steps and hopefully not your sanity. My job is to make that less agonizing for the user. Now that I am satisfied with where Mac UTAU stands, I have been working very hard on my personal projects. I wish to entertain the creative aspects of UTAU and hope that by making these tutorials, people spend less time sweating the small details, and more time expressing themselves.
To wrap this up, I am not going to address Hakken's foot, I just wanted your attention obviously so you can read through this post and develop empathy for Mac users. From time to time, I have talked about these issues from the start of this journey, with unconventional solutions, asking questions, and reaching a feasible conclusion. Tying it all up and leaving all these questions answered. I really do enjoy this research and feel that it was all worth it in the end. I hope to continue building my resources and assist others on their UTAU endeavors!
