maandag, mei 21, 2007
Hear my voice - Audacity
The other day I was playing with a test release of IBM's upcoming social-software-for-the-enterprise Lotus Connections. In your profile you can add a sound file with the pronunciation of your name. It is something we have already for a long time internal in IBM and it makes sense. No more embarrassment during the first phone call or meeting when you mispronounce someone's name.So I created a little sound file and uploaded it. Every Windows computer comes with the basic 'Sound Recorder' tool, in the Accessoires folder. Very easy to use, just click 'Record', speak and save the file. It is saved as WAV format, which is what Lotus Connections needs. The problem is that a lot of background noise (such as computer fans) are in the recording. So I downloaded and tried the popular open source sound recording and editing program Audacity. I'm not much of a sound man myself, but I did find out how to use the noise reduction effect in Audacity:
- Make a sound recording
- Select a piece of noise in the recording and select the Effects menu and Noise Removal
- Click the button Get Noise Profile
- Highlight the piece you want to edit, select the noise removal, again and apply 'Remove Noise' in step 2 of the dialog box.
- Save the file
The only problem was my recording now was more than the allowed 100 KB. And I haven't found out how to reduce that yet.
Here is a sample of both
Click here for the WAV file made with sound recorder
Click here for the WAV file made with Audacity
PS: In case you want to know, I'm using a Plantronics USB headset DSP 400.
Labels: audacity
