[arm-allstar] Voice recordings

[Wayne Hale]

Here's another way to make custom voice messages.

I got an Echo Dot device for Christmas.  It turns out if you say "Alexa, 
Simon Says WK7B Repeater", the Dot will reply with "WK7B Repeater", but 
the spacing between individual letters in the call is a little long.  I 
used an inexpensive desk mike plugged into my desktop PC running the 
free Audacity software using settings from this article 
http://images.ohnosec.org/app-rpt-audacity.pdf Place the microphone 
close to the Dot device in a relatively quiet room and play around with 
the mike gain until you get an acceptable recording level.

Using the settings from the above link, record the output from the Dot 
into Audacity.  You can then see the waveform and spacing between the 
individual letters.  Using the edit features of Audacity, simply select 
the undesired empty area and use the Cut function.  If you get to 
aggressive, you can use the Undo feature to put back clips.  You can use 
the same feature to edit out blank space at the beginning and end of the 
recording until you get it sounding just right.

Again, following the instructions in the article above, normalize the 
levels and convert to the proper format.  Copy the resulting sound file 
into /etc/asterisk/local/yoursoundfile with the extension .ulaw. 
Yoursoundfile can be any name that makes sense to you, just make sure to 
include the ulaw extension

Log into your Pi and edit /etc/asterisk/rpt.conf 
idrecording=/etc/asterisk/local/yoursoundfile  Note, do NOT include the 
.ulaw extension here.  Save the file, restart asterisk and you should be 
good to go.  From iaxrpt logged into your node, enter *80 to hear the ID.

The Dot device's female voice sounds great over the repeater and can be 
easily changed.  The only problem was the spacing between letters.  I 
would imagine this same technique of editing could be used on sound 
files created by other means.  Audacity is free/open source and 
available for Windows, Linux and Mac.

73,

Wayne W6IZK

nodes 2099, 28146, 29454, 29629, 40809,