Hi, everyone. I’m Cinna, the director of Maghni.
First and foremost, I want to sincerely apologize for the several months that have passed since our last proper update. The responsibility for that silence ultimately falls on me.
When we began preparing what would become our next progress update, I initially hoped and, ultimately encouraged, the team to hold off on sharing news, despite their disapproval. It was my belief that waiting until we had something massive to show would be the safest plan forward, due to ongoing tensions with previous management. Unfortunately, I couldn’t have been more off the mark.
Rebuilding the project from the ground up and restructuring years of existing work into a stable, maintainable foundation has taken significantly longer than we anticipated. Much of our time has been spent rebuilding systems that, while essential, don't produce the kind of visible progress that's easy to showcase. I'm deeply sorry that so much time passed without clearer communication from us.
Going forward, we're making a conscious effort to communicate more consistently, even during periods where progress is happening primarily behind the scenes. You deserve to know where the project stands, and we'll do a better job of keeping you informed.
Challenges
Since Maghni was restructured last year, development has been funded directly by the remaining members of the team. Several members have even taken on additional work outside the project to help fund development while also supporting themselves. We aren't sharing this to ask for sympathy or excuse the project's delays. We simply want to be transparent about the circumstances under which Maghni is currently being developed.
When the current team assumed responsibility for the project, our goal was to address the problems left behind and move Maghni forward as responsibly as possible. We took on this responsibility because we believed the project deserved another chance, and because we felt the people who supported it deserved every effort we could reasonably make to see it through.
Everyone who believed in Maghni deserves honest, consistent communication while we put our best efforts towards delivering on as much of the project's original vision as we responsibly can. While there are still technical and organizational challenges ahead, we're committed to continuing that work.
Backer Rewards
We'd also like to share the most up-to-date status of the Indiegogo rewards. As some of you may remember from our previous discussions, all physical Indiegogo rewards were paid for, produced, and transferred to VocaTone, along with the necessary shipping supplies and fulfillment information. Despite those efforts, significant issues for all respective parties remain unresolved.
We understand how frustrating this has been for everyone who supported the campaign. It's equally difficult for those continuing to work on the project while trying to resolve issues that originated before the current team's involvement. We sincerely appreciate your patience as we continue doing everything within our ability to move the project forward.
Refunds
Unfortunately, due to the loss of most of our reliable communication channels with VocaTone's leadership, we currently do not have a practical way to resolve these remaining fulfillment issues directly, despite previous attempts to make contact.
We remain committed to continuing development of Maghni, but we also want to be transparent about the limits of what the current team can realistically resolve. For matters relating to the original crowdfunding campaign or physical reward fulfillment, we encourage backers to contact VocaTone directly. Some aspects of the campaign remain outside the current team's control despite our continued efforts to resolve them. If the situation changes, we’ll be quick to update everyone via our various channels.
Progress
The current team is actively rebuilding Maghni's backend infrastructure and AI engine components. Unfortunately, this stage of development doesn't lend itself particularly well to exciting public previews. Much of our work currently involves architecture, programming, debugging, and internal tools that ultimately make the software more stable and reliable but aren't immediately visible to end users.
While we can’t share a release date at this time, we’re striving to overcome the process of rebuilding everything by scratch as soon as possible. In the meantime, however, a few members of our development team have been working on a lot of exciting things.
We have heard the requests to open-source components of our engine and workflow, and while we can’t share everything we work on, we hope the provided tools will prove useful to the overall vocal synthesis scene. The current tools publicly available consist of non-morphological boundary detection + phoneme classification, and a deterministic model for realistic consonant placement, both tailored to the singing voice synthesis realm. Feel free to access the projects at the links below and keep an eye out for future components that we open source.
- mina, an AI phoneme alignment tool that is used to help speed up library production by offering a base alignment that is near-correct
- maghni-flow, the open source non-AI timing model for Maghni that recreates the timing of consonant clusters using exact data from the voice provider.
Communication
Development is naturally slower than it would be for a fully funded team working full-time, but to offset that, we're also changing the way we approach communication.
Our plan is to provide updates more consistently and create better, more consistent opportunities for discussion with the community. To aid this, we’re considering opening the Discord server originally promised during the crowdfunding campaign. If there's still interest, we'd love to create a place where backers can ask questions, interact with one another, and stay informed as development continues.
Updates large and small will continue to be posted on our website, with an effort to incorporate more chances for us to reach out to backers, community members, and vocal synthesis enjoyers to garner feedback. We'll spend some time gathering responses before moving forward with whichever option best serves the community, so please don’t hesitate to let us know your thoughts!
TL;DR
Our central goal remains delivering a functioning product to the people who supported Maghni.
The current team inherited substantial technical, financial, and organizational challenges. Even so, we've continued because we believe the people who supported this project deserve our best effort to see it through.
Development is continuing, but we aren't yet in a position to responsibly announce a release date. We'd rather avoid making promises we may not be able to keep and instead continue rebuilding the project until we reach a point where we can provide a realistic timeline.
We're especially excited to show you the new vocoder we've built from scratch for the engine. It's one of the pieces of technology we're most proud of, and we look forward to sharing it when it's ready.
Moving forward...
We know that words alone cannot repair years of frustration. Trust is rebuilt through consistent communication, visible progress, and honesty about our limitations. The current team cannot undo every decision made before the restructuring. We cannot immediately recover missing materials, regain control of accounts managed by another entity, or personally finance solutions to so many of the outstanding problems this project has faced.
What we can do is continue rebuilding Maghni, communicate more openly, and treat the people who supported this project with the respect and transparency they deserve.
We're immensely grateful to everyone who has remained patient, offered encouragement, or continued to believe this project can still become something worthwhile. We're also incredibly grateful to every developer and contributor who has volunteered their time, resources, and energy to keep Maghni moving forward. We're sincerely sorry this update took so long.
Thank you for reading, for continuing to hold us accountable, and for giving our team the opportunity to explain where the project stands. We hope this marks the beginning of greater transparency and a more hopeful chapter for everyone who has supported Maghni.
One final note—we'll probably be retiring the "AI" portion of Maghni's name. At this point, it feels a little overdue.
All the best, —Cinna Director, Maghni