Voice For The Voiceless

Gaear may say otherwise as he knows more about such things, but I say no. Alas, a man's got to know his limitations. But if you focus on what we can do, I tihnk you will find a great deal of opportunities.

May I recommend my tutorials? The early ones deal with such things.

http://rpg-rant.blogspot.com/2005/11/tutorial-list.html

 

Have a look here to see the original 'Voicing the Voiceless' project from years gone by.

Muting doesn't really need fixing, as it's the voices that always win out when two different types of audio are playing at the same time anyway (background music is attenuated).

Feel free to have at it. If the custom voices are of sufficient quality to include in the modpack, I would ultimately convert your original audio to .mp3 for distribution. So recording in .wav and posting it here for editing/conversion would be preferable, as .wav is a much less lossy format than .mp3.

Just to be up-front about all of this, here's a disclaimer: low quality voice acting is one of the worst things that can happen to a mod, so we apply rather rigid standards as to what is acceptable for the modpack or not. The voice actors in the original project were for the most part theater professionals (working for universities and whatnot - not Patrick Stewart but still trained) using a semi-professional recording environment and equipment.

Basically, what you need is:

• a suitable recording environment with little or no background noise and good acoustics (buses going by in the background are no good; tinny sound is no good)
• decent recording equipment (you really should have a good mic with quarter inch jacks going into a quality breakout box and recording into a capable app [something that can record audio at 16 bit resolution, 41000 Hz sample rate] on your computer)
• some degree of talent or aptitude for voice acting

If you're not interested in doing this for the modpack or worrying about standards, you should still feel free and we'll list a redirect to your hosting location in our 'Other Downloads' forum. (We can't really host it ourselves because the file size for any type of audio is generally too large.)

If you've got any other questions, feel free to ask. We're here to help.

 

@Panmorn -

If there are no female voice actors, that's just the way it is.

The original project thread is outdated. Do you have some ideas for which NPCs you'd like to voice? I can let you know if they are suitable choices or not (some may not be due to the need for flexibility to accomodate frequent changes, e.g. Brother Smyth) and then post their dialog files for you.

@DS -

Not sure what you mean by "transcode ... on installation." The files that ship with the mod should be as small as they can be already by the time I get through with them (converted to 64 kbps mono .mp3, iirc), so size isn't too much of an issue. I prefer not to work with .mp3 or other compressed formats in an editing environment, but certainly can if necessary.

 

lol, I'm confused ... what size issue are you referring to - hosting, shipping w/mod, editing?

We can't really host downloads of any significant size here (which is why we put our stuff on ModDB now).

It's not an issue for shipping with the mod, pretty much.

As long as Panmorn Fletcher doesn't have any upload restrictions, he should upload his stuff somewhere in as lossless a format as possible for me to work on. That's just a basic principal of audio editing - work with high quality audio, because you can always go down but you can't go up..

 

Yeah, ModDB keeps pretty good stats on traffic. See here.

They say 1,385 downloads in the last 30 days, although that's probably low because I just recently removed the 5.8.0 series mods from there and that counts against you for some reason.

Our host Sorcerer's Place is not really set up as a warehouse, per se. (I think Taluntain has significant space, but he doesn't really want to use it for stuff like that, not to mention the bandwidth hit.)

Yeah, there are plenty of sites now where you can just throw whatever on up for nothing. (Filefront lets you do it with no questions asked whatsoever.) I think Panmorn's only potential limitation would be if his ISP limited his activity or if he was on a 'pay-as-you-go' schedule or something like that.

 

I think Zorn and Co. (from the original project) actually had a 'quiet room' - little or no ambient noise, sound dampened walls - they used for recording. Since Zorn was a theater guy, he had all that stuff already. It really is quite important, because things you wouldn't even think of may enter into the recording through an open mic, not to mention noise and random harmonics/hum through the electronics themsleves (which is why I would disagree with sirchet about mic quality; imo it's the most important thing).

Sirchet's on the right track with the de-esser stuff though, and while I've never done this myself, I think the acoustics are most happy in a room with some headroom (high ceiling).

Audacity is indeed a fine app for this stuff, and free.

Never add reverb or other effects on your end though - leave that for the engineer if it's needed (unless you are the engineer).