asterisk users - Jul 2003 - Ideal Prompt Recording Setup?

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?).

Thanks,
Justin

I've always just recorded messages into a voicemail box and copied the .gsm
files to the sounds dir under the appropriate name...

-----Original Message-----
From: asterisk-users-admin@lists.digium.com
[mailto:asterisk-users-admin@lists.digium.com] On Behalf Of
justin@vergeworks.com
Sent: Tuesday, July 22, 2003 3:24 PM
To: asterisk-users@lists.digium.com
Subject: [Asterisk-Users] Ideal Prompt Recording Setup?

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?).

Thanks,
Justin

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Quoting justin@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

>>>>> "Jamie" == Jamie Neil <jamie@versado.net>
writes:
Jamie> I had pretty good results recording from a standard headset, on a
basic
Jamie> sound card at 44Khz mono.

Note that if your soundcard can do eg 48kHz or 32kHz linear, the
conversion down to 8kHz log will sound a bit better -- perhaps a
lot better if you are compressing -- than 44.1 kHz originals.

Not all pc audio cards are capable of anything other than 44.1.
Others may even be able to record directly to ulaw/alaw or even
somehing like gsm.

In simple terms, try to record in DAT quality rather than CD
quality.  It should just work better for telco applications.

-JimC