asterisk users - Oct 2003 - Anyone else use Audacity for prompts?

I am using Audacity to record some voice prompts.

The .wav files I'm producing are of stellar quality.  However, once I 
turn them into .gsm, they sound buzzy and muffled.

I know that some of this comes with the territory, but I wonder if there 
is anyone out there who does this routinely, and who can advise me as to 
the MO I could use that results in the highest quality in the resulting 
playback files.

Thanks.

B.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Brian Capouch" <brianc@palaver.net>
To: <asterisk-users@lists.digium.com>
Sent: Monday, October 06, 2003 5:21 PM
Subject: [Asterisk-Users] Anyone else use Audacity for prompts?

> I am using Audacity to record some voice prompts.
>
> The .wav files I'm producing are of stellar quality.  However, once I
> turn them into .gsm, they sound buzzy and muffled.
>
> I know that some of this comes with the territory, but I wonder if there
> is anyone out there who does this routinely, and who can advise me as to
> the MO I could use that results in the highest quality in the resulting
> playback files.
>
> Thanks.
>
> B.
What are you using to convert the wav files to gsm? I've been using
'sox'
under Linux and have had no quality issues whatsoever.

An example line to convert:

sox file.wav -r 8000 -c 1 file.gsm

-Shaun

Why compress all your prompts to .gsm files?  Isn't * going to have to 
reformat them anyway based on the codec being used for the call?  I have all 
my voice prompts as 8khz/16bit .wav files (* can't seem to play back 8 bit 
files).  I recorded them through soundforge as a 48Khz/16bit mono .wav - did a 
little tweaking to compress and brighten them up - then resampled to 8khz.  
Quality is as good as any I've heard from any commercial PBX...  It is 
important to me, if I'm going to use * for my business, that the voice
prompts
sound as clean and clear as any other system - from a marketing/PR standpoint.




Dave Redmore