[Asterisk-Users] Ideal Prompt Recording Setup?

[Jamie Neil]

Quoting justin at vergeworks.com
> What have people found to be the ideal setup for recording asterisk
> prompts?
>
> I'm looking for both the ideal application to record them in, the ideal
> format, as well as hardware (do I need a fancy studio mic or will a
> headset mic work?).

I had pretty good results recording from a standard headset, on a basic
sound card at 44Khz mono.

After recording a set of words/phrases I used audacity to chop them up, trim
off excess silence and then optimise/standardise the levels. As I was
feeling particularly fussy I also filtered out obvious clicks and any
background noise. Final step was to convert the files to gsm format using
sox (make sure you adjust the sample rate to 8Khz). I may have missed
something or got the syntax wrong as it's been a while since I did this, but
I think the syntax was:

sox sample.wav -r 8000 sample.gsm resample

I think the extra processing is worth it as the improvement in sound quality
is striking. It's especially obvious if you are recording elements that will
be concatenated to form phrases (e.g. numbers).

Hope that helps,

Jamie