Bruce,
If you apply some simple principles you can do some very good recording
with a small investment. Now I've not used my system for IVR, but have
for mastering music recordings. The main components are:
- the environment
- a sound proof or well deadened room which absorbs sound. Ideally a
small room with acoustic panels, but can be an area with heavy fabric
on the walls or the fabric office panels. Make sure your recording
equipment is separated from this area to ensure there is no ambient
sounds ( eg computer fan noise, key/mouse clicking, hard drive hum,
etc..... )
- microphone
- here you need to probably need to spend at least $100 ( a Shure
SM58 as a min ) up to $400 for a good Sennheiser (MD421) but a good
middle ground is say a Rode NT1-A for $200
- mixer/sound card
- now I have 16 track board which is overkill for what your looking
to do ($2700) , but you could go with something like an M-Studio USB
audio interface, depending on the microphone you may need to ensure you
get one with phantom power ( 160-250 ).
-software
- here I use a few packages. One for recording and mixing an another
for cleaning up the actual sound. For IVR prompts you probably don't
need separate packages since your just recording from one source so no
need for multitrack. On the cheap as in free there is Audacity which is
a pretty good package, though it's noise removal crashes quite often for
me. I use Cool Edit Pro ($70) for my sound file cleaning, it has worked
great for me for years. And fr multi track recording I use NTrack it has
a lot of high end features that you'd find in ProTools or CUBase but
only costs about $70, again you might not need this unless you need to
do any looping.
- listening
- lastly you'll need a good set of headphones ($90), which is a lot
cheaper then investing in studio monitor speakers ($800-2,000).
- the voice
- this is the hardest part usually, since typically if your doing
this for a client they have an image or brand they are portraying
(free-300/hr).
Now after all that you looking at a minimum of $500, not including the
computer or voice talent.
The other option is to use a pro. I've also used http://voice123.com/
which is an online voice talent marketplace. You look and find the voice
you like, then send them the script. They give you a price and if you
agree, they send a sample you sign off and deposit your money they send
the audio file, you approve and they get paid. One thing here though
you'll stil need to have audio editing software since you may need to
break up the audio from the source into the segments you want or add
silence to the lead in of the audios.
Just some more food for thought.
Mike
Bruce Nik wrote:
Hello everyone,
I would like to know what type of tricks, tools, and environment you use to achieve the best sound quality possible for Asterisk IVRs. I am looking into in-house solutions rather than professional sound recorders or Digium voice overs. Do you use a Doller Store microphone? Do you use any specific software? Does a really expensive Sony microphone makes much of a difference (3-way microphone)? Do sound effects to normalize the sound help afterwards? How many Mhz do you set the sound at? Stereo? Mono? Do you close the windows when recording ? :) any feedback would be appreciated.
Thanks,
Bruce
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Mike Ashton
Quality Track Intl
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