How to make voices without something to record?

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Noob.com_123-321
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I don't have anything to record with. How can I make HedgeWars voices W/O anything to record with?

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Star and Moon
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Answer: It's not possible.

Solution: Buy a microphone.

Noob.com_123-321
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Star and Moon allegedly wrote:

Answer: It's not possible.

Solution: Buy a microphone.


That's not an answer. PLZ, You can even say make one out of some OGG files externally if it is required. Also, I don't have money for a new microphone.

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Wuzzy
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Wrong, Star and Moon, it is indeed possible. You are horribly wrong, Star and Moon. Here is the proof: Voicepack: Anonymous.

So, Noob.com_123-321, yes, it is indeed possible to create voicepacks without anything to record. You can create synthetic voices with so-called text-to-speech (TTS) software. For the Anonymous voicepack I used Festival to create voices. In this case speech synthesis was absolutely intentional because these videos on videos labelled “Anonymous” often use speech synthesis, too. I thought it is a fun idea to create a whole voicepack based on the Anonymous phenomenon. Smile

You have to read the documentation first or you won’t understand anything. AFAIK Festival is primarily a console application which seems to be very powerful but you also have to learn a lot first.

Another program I experimented with was MARY TTS which is also very interesting. They also provide an online demonstration to test the synthetic voices. MARY TTS provides classic console interface but also a graphical interface. I think MARY TTS is somewhat easier to use but may be harder to set up.

Both Festival and MARY TTS are free software, no strings attached. I was aware of other free TTS software but I didn’t test these so far also I forgot their names.

I won’t provide particular help on the programs itself as I am myself a newbie to speech synthesis myself; so you have to dig through the documentation first or maybe you can ask a question on their mailing lists as long as you precisely describe your problem.

I can however roughly tell you how I created the Anonymous voices: First I created some WAVE files with Festival. This was the speech synthesis. Festival itself does not encode to Ogg Vorbis. So you have to take the WAVE files and give them to an Ogg Vorbis encoder so the WAVE files become encoded to Ogg Vorbis files. Hedgewars does only accept Ogg Vorbis, but not WAVE.

The voice files have to be copied to $HWHOME/Data/Sounds/voices/$VOICEPACK.
Replace $HWHOME with your personal Hedgewars configuration directory (depends on your operating system) and $VOICEPACK with the name of your voicepack. I don’t know exactly which voice files are currently accepted by Hedgewars; some existing voicepack have voice files which are not used by Hedgewars; some existing voicepack lack of certain voice files (for example Bugger.ogg). Question: Is there a complete list of Hedgewars’ supported voice files somewhere?

I hope these little pointers help you, Noob.com_123-321. Smile

Hi, I am a Hedgewars developer. Smile

Noob.com_123-321
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It looks like you made the best answer. Would you like the admins to close this thread?

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CheezeMonkey
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Noob.com_123-321 allegedly wrote:

It looks like you made the best answer. Would you like the admins to close this thread?

I'm really not sure why you decide to bring back a thread which was dead for three months, just to ask if it should be closed...

Inu
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I'd risk to say that it's "to increase post count".
Beats me why, but some people go crazy about it. Maybe they associate it with importance on that forum or something?

Noob.com_123-321
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Wuzzy gave the best answer. May you please close this thread now?

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