Author Topic: How to replace system's Mike prompts with Crystal  (Read 8734 times)

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Offline garcq

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How to replace system's Mike prompts with Crystal
« on: May 20, 2007, 05:27:37 pm »
after reading some of the posts I started doing some research on how to replace the system "prompts", such as "the current artist is...." and the alphabet letters "a", "b", etc.
As you know, when you select Crystal as the voice for the DMS artist, album, genre and playlists, the male voice still speaks these prompts, make it it a mix of Mike and Crystal's voices.

I really liked the outcome of what I did, so I figured I should post it.

I used an oline demo of the AT&T Natural Voices, to create WAV files of those prompts. Then I used CoolEdit to convert them to the right Mp3 format.
Here's the link to the online demo
http://www.research.att.com/~ttsweb/tts/demo.php
you just tupe the phrase and you can save it as a wav file.

I converted the following prompts:
"the current artist is"
"the current album is"
"the current playlist is"
"the current genre is"
and all the alpha letters that are spoken as you search in alphabetic order.

The cool thing is that you can change the prompt to whatever you want. For example, I changed "the current artist is" to "you are listening to", using Crystal's voice.

A useful hint: when using the online tool you can type "a, b, c, d, e" etc, so that you can have one large WAV file with all the letters, and then use an audio editing tool like CoolEdit (now owned by Adobe) to extract each piece to save as separate files, instead of using the demo individually for each letter. That would make the conversion to mp3 a lot more time consuming.

The files that I replaced were in this location:
F: (PHTSYS)\TSS

They were just the
a.alpha.mp3 to z.alpha.mp3
cur0.mp3 to cur3.mpw
Corrupt Track.wav

Obivously, you want to backup the original male voice files first to your computer.

All this took me less than an hour.

good luck

Offline VorTechS

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Re: How to replace system's Mike prompts with Crystal
« Reply #1 on: May 20, 2007, 06:48:37 pm »
For those not wanting to go the long way round, I also have a function that does all of this in one tool from withing PhatHack Media Manager - it's been around for a while now...

For more information you can check out this thread:

http://forum.phathack.com/index.php/topic,1123.0.html
Kenwood KDC-W7031 | Kenwood KHD-CX910 | 250GB DMS | PhatHack Media Manager v1.1.4 (Alpha) | VIOT

Catch me weekdays 8am-4pm GMT on IRC @ irc.freenode.net on channel #phathack (aka the chat link!!)