New to music and sound

[Clint_Thomas]

I have installed Audacity and will try to make a test voice according to the wiki. I am new to all this, I have set the sampling rate at 22050 Hz. I hope that is correct. If anyone has any other setting recommendations, please let me know. I am trying to find a quieter location as the first test recording I made has low level white noise in the background. I believe from the AC.

Thanks

PS can I post the test here?

[CLoneWolf]

I have installed Audacity and will try to make a test voice according to the wiki. I am new to all this, I have set the sampling rate at 22050 Hz. I hope that is correct. If anyone has any other setting recommendations, please let me know

Considering that the "radio-like" post-processing we generally apply will reduce quality on purpose, 22050 Hz should be enough and help keeping the file sizes down a bit. Feel free to check the current faction voices for reference.
If you have time and room for an experiment, you might try recording a single line at 44 KHz, save a down-sampled copy at 22 KHz, and compare them, deciding for yourself if the quality drop is unacceptable.

I am trying to find a quieter location as the first test recording I made has low level white noise in the background. I believe from the AC.
Thanks
PS can I post the test here?

Don't worry too much about background noise, as 2 features of Audacity will help you a lot:

A. Noise Removal:
1. start recording, be quiet for a few seconds, to record only the background noise, then start talking.
2. select a part of that "silence".
3. from the Effects menu choose Noise Removal.
4. press the button to elaborate the noise profile (sorry, mine is in Italian and I don't remember the original caption, but it's the lone button in the upper frame labelled Step 1)
5. select the whole recording (Ctrl-A).
6. choose Noise Removal again.
7. this time, press the Apply button; the default settings for the parameters should already do a good job.

B. Insert Silence:
1. select the leading or trailing silence, or a pause between sentences.
2. press Ctrl-L to replace your selection with complete silence.

In case you're not satisfied with Audacity's noise removal, there's another great tool aimed just at that: Gnome Wave Cleaner.

[Clint_Thomas]

Thanks for the info CloneWolf. I hope to have a good test done by the end of the weekend, work permitting.

[CLoneWolf]

Thanks for the info CloneWolf. I hope to have a good test done by the end of the weekend, work permitting.

You're welcome! Take your time, there's no real hurry
I just noticed I forgot to answer to the sample posting bit
...especially as I don't have an authoritative answer!
I don't know the attachment size limit here, so I've always put my tests in a web space of mine and posted links here; so you could try attaching them here, putting 'em on your web space if you have one, or one of the temporary public ones or, as a last resort, send 'em to me and i'll host 'em and link 'em here.

[Turbo]

Welcome and thanks for helping. I've recently been doing voices for the Thief community, so I hadn't checked in lately. So thanks also to CloneWolf for being here to welcome new talent.

The audio guidelines for the VS game (including how to get the voices into the game, factions that need voices, and so on) are here:
http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/media ... ice_Acting

And here's some discussion of various techniques for voice acting:
http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/forum ... 29&t=14884

But mostly, just play with it. We have some human factions left to do, and some aliens, so work on whichever ones seem fun.