Hi Teleflow,

We have finished our application development and we were testing it on a D/4PCIUF. However, we have quickly ran into some difficulty. Our voice-overs are nowhere near as clear or as loud as the TeleFlow voice prompts. We are recording with a high-end sound card and digital microphone in a quiet environment. We are recording them in 16bit 8khz WAV and then using the inbuilt tool in Teleflow Designer to convert them to VOX. I am pretty sure it has to do with the recording format we are using as the Teleflow prompts sound fine...

Please can you advise on how we can improve this?

Thank you

16bit 8khz WAV should be fine.

I would say "welcome to sound recording in Windows"; frequently I have had an environment set up perfectly for recordings, and the very next time I use it, things aren't working the same.

Many devices/programs that do anything with the sound card will affect your settings without you even knowing it.

What I would suggest is that you double-check your sound settings before doing any recording, and always do a sound check when starting a new recording session. If the volume is suddenly louder/quieter, you have to tinker with the settings until you have it right.

Be sure to go to your sound devices and check if the Microphone "Mute" box is checked. Ensure that the Volume slider is at the max volume. Click the "Advanced" button, and if it isn't already, check the Mic Boost (assuming there is one).

If you have every setting you can find on high volume, and you STILL can't get the volume you need, you might just have to consider recording and then amplifying your files before converting them to VOX. If the prompts that come with TeleFlow are particularly loud, you might prefer to reduce their volume instead.

actually, the included prompts are perfect.

We switched on Mic Boost and saw an improvement, but it is still relatively low. It can be heard when calling from a quiet environment, but as soon as you have some background noise (such as a TV switched on) the limited volume becomes far more apparent and the prompts can barely be heard. Also, when calling from a cell phone, the volume has to be set to max before you can hear the prompts...

Even more alarming, after some further tests, we found that some parts of the voice prompts are randomly 'skipping' and not being played at all. The test Dialogic voice applications work fine.

what software can be used to amplify the volume of the recordings? should we be converting the audio files to VOX using voiceplayer or using the inbuilt teleflow designer converter (are they any different?)?

thanks

The program that we've had the most success with is "CoolEdit". It used to be produced by Syntrillium, but was recently bought by Adobe (http://www.adobe.com/special/products/audition/syntrillium.html). I am not sure about the latest version, but CoolEdit 96 and CoolEdit 2000 have great batch-processing features to automate the editing of multiple files. CoolEdit also supports Dialogic VOX format natively.

Another one that's gaining ground is Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/download/). I am not sure about its features, but the price is right.

I believe the VoicePlayer's converter and the Designer's converter are the same, but for safety, use the Designer. That is the one I always use.