Hi there everyone I am a final year uni student studying in Interactive Media in sunny England! For a project I am creating, I need to be able to include some voice overs. I have tried 'Write Out Loud' for the mac and also 'text-to-audio' for the pc. These are not really good enough voice over quality for what I want to do. I am not creating a game and have never done so, so I was soon stuck with what game developers would use for their voice over audio tracks. Any ideas or suggestions?? Thanks! Jo

Usually they're just recorded in a studio. Or are you looking for speech synthesis? As far as I know it is hardly used in games.

Greetz,

Illco

It's not in the software, its all in the hardware, if you´re using a cheap microphone directly hooked up to the sound board, you're going to get crappy sound, no matter what software you're using.

You'll need to get a real microphone, you know, the expensive ones that weight like bricks, and probably also a preamp, I recently bought this one to hook up my Guitar for recording and for my future voiceover needs... I have no mic yet tough.

Thanks very much for your help guys!

I may be able to book a recording studio at my university. Any other suggestions are very welcome, otherwise, thanks a lot.

Jo

Are you studying in Bournemouth? I only ask because i graduated there a few years back...

Yeah, we use speech synthesis as place holder dialog just to test things out, saves having to record/edit temp dialog... but even the AT&T synthesis we use, which is pretty nice, is still quite laughable sometimes... and it certainly isn't at a point where you can use it as final dialog yet...

As for recording... it really depends on how high the quality needs to be, you can get good results with cheap(ish) equipment now... as long as the person doing the session knows what they are doing...

Give me a shout if you need any more info or whatever...

Hi. I do study at Bournemouth! I'm at the Arts Institute, Wallisdown. Im not interested too much in the quality of the sound exactly (i'll probably just use a cheap microphone). More interested in the type of voice to create the correct character effect. Any synthesiser software you can recommend?

Thanks for the help.

Jo

How funny, i went there, next to the university yeah... I did the film course there when Rik Stratton was in charge... think he got sacked ;) now doing sound for games full time...

anyway, i think you need to understand the difference between synthesis and recording. If you want to use speech synthesis you'll need some sort of text to speech program, they come with some shoddy speech 'voices' but you can buy 3rd party ones, we got some from AT&T for about fifty quid, with different accents. But really, they sound very unnatural and inhuman... like the stephen hawkings voice but with a more 'real' voice...no conversational intonation at all.

What i think you really mean is to record a 'real' voice and edit it using a sound editor of some description. I don't know if they still have a audio course at the arts institute, i think they changed it to multimedia production or something. People there will certainly know how to help you out, i imagine they still have the same recording studio there. It doesn't take long at all to set up and do a recording session so it's no big deal. Say hello to Andy Blaney from Rob Blake if he's still working there...

Im on the Interactive Multimedia course. Never heard of Andy Blaney I'm afraid!

Thanks very much for your help. I have tried the demo of the AT&T synthesis and you are very right about it being inhuman! I shall give the recording a go and hope for the best!

Thanks again.

Jo