Womanizer

Windows-only as of 2026-06-01 (VRChat does not ship a native macOS client).

A 100% local, CPU-only, real-time male→female voice converter for VRChat on Windows 10/11. Independent pitch + formant shifting via signalsmith-stretch, plus breathiness / brightness / de-essing shaping. Imperceptible conversation latency, zero GPU contention, fully offline. An OtterBot product, distributed free.

See .planning/PROJECT.md for the full product definition, requirements, and architectural constraints. Locked tech-stack pin rationale is documented in this README.md and inline in Cargo.toml.

Build Prerequisites (Windows)

Womanizer is a pure-Rust workspace, but one transitive build dependency requires native tooling beyond a stock Rust install. Before running cargo build or cargo test on a clean Windows checkout, install LLVM/Clang.

The fastest path: run the bundled setup script. From the repo root, in any PowerShell:

powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File scripts\setup-windows.ps1

The script is idempotent — it detects an existing LLVM install and exits cleanly. If LLVM isn't present, it prefers winget (no admin required) and falls back to choco. After it finishes, close and reopen your terminal so the new PATH entries become visible, then proceed with cargo build --release.

Why this is needed: signalsmith-stretch 0.1.3 pulls in bindgen ^0.70 as a build-dependency. bindgen parses C++ headers and generates Rust FFI bindings by invoking libclang.dll at build time. Visual Studio Build Tools and the MSVC toolchain alone do not ship libclang.dll — only the LLVM toolchain does. Without it, the first clean build fails with error: Unable to find libclang. (This is the canonical bindgen-on-Windows pitfall — RESEARCH §Pitfall 3.)

Manual install (if you'd rather not run the script):

• winget:

  winget install LLVM.LLVM

• Chocolatey:

  choco install llvm

• Or the official LLVM Windows installer (LLVM 16 or newer) from releases.llvm.org. Pick the LLVM-x.y.z-win64.exe artifact and select "Add LLVM to the system PATH" during install.

CI installs LLVM automatically on the Windows runner via choco install llvm (see .github/workflows/ci.yml); local Windows workstations need the one-time install above.

Building

Once LLVM is installed:

cargo build --release

The first clean build adds ~5–10 seconds for the signalsmith-stretch C++ compile; subsequent incremental builds are unaffected. All other dependencies (cpal, rubato, rusqlite with bundled, egui, etc.) are pure Rust and need no system libraries.

Testing

cargo test --all --features womanizer-engine/test-injection

The test-injection feature is required by the AUDIO-09 reconnect integration test (see crates/womanizer-engine/Cargo.toml for rationale). It is OFF in the shipped binary.

License

See LICENSE. First-party Womanizer code is OtterBot IP; third-party crate licenses are audited at every CI run via cargo deny check licenses against the allow-list in deny.toml (MIT / Apache-2.0 / BSD-* / ISC / Zlib / MPL-2.0 — no GPL).