[Asterisk-Users] English vs American voice files

[matt.riddell at sineapps.com]

On 16 Sep 2004 at 20:37, Mark Phillips wrote:

> No disrespect to Alison (whom I know is a Canadian) intended but her
> "British" accent is exactly that; "British". It's very easy to hear
> that she's not from Chipping Sodbury.
> 
> Also, do you really have the budget to spend on having all the
> relevant files recorded at $12 a time. That works out to a lot of
> money!
> 

Hate to state the obvious, but why don't you just record them 
yourselves.

Options:

1) Beg, borrow or steal a microphone
2) Download the list of filenames, prompts contained
3) Record all prompts in one go, 1 after another with a 1-2 second 
gap between
4) Use some free audio editing software to snip the big file into 
little files, and save each one as the correct filename (albeit with 
.wav as the extension).
5) If you feel up to it, run a batch process over them to bring them 
all close to 0db
6) Use sox to convert to gsm files
7) Provide the resulting sound files as a free download from your 
website so that others don't have to do the same thing.

I can help you with any step from 2 on (unless you want to come to 
one of my 2 studios here in New Zealand and borrow a microphone).

Really the hardest part is splitting the files, but it only takes 
around a hour for the full set (I'm lucky, my wife who I recorded for 
the French prompts had also done School of Audio Engineering and so 
was able to use Wavelab to do the snipping etc.

The other option is to just use the telephone and the asterisk 
dialplan to record the prompts, but I would say this would take 
rather a bit longer (unless you made a script that would record the 
first file, press # to confirm, record next file etc).

Drop me a line if you need a hand with any of the above, should you 
devide to record them yourself.

Matt Riddell
(New Zealand Digium Distribution/Custom Software)
http://www.sineapps.com/downloads.php (French Prompts)
http://www.sineapps.com/news.php (asterisk news)