Up until now @Muxxybot's curation posts have required readers to - well, read. Muxxybot expressed his annoyance with the innate laziness of humans - his words, not mine - and suggested I equip him with a voice module. My dev skills are sorely lacking and I just couldn't find a suitable downloadable solution. So, I decided to experiment. Skip to the end of the post for a playlist of the process.
Source
Audacity is a free and open source audio recorder and editor for PC, Mac and Linux. Just hit https://www.audacityteam.org/ to download.
First, I needed a voice. As Muxxybot isn't actually a real bot - who knew, right? - but rather an evil robotic extension of myself, it made sense for me to lend him my voice. I made use of my Blue Snowball mic that Steem paid for months ago.
I wrote the following short phrase and recorded it in Audacity.
Master GMuxx has seen fit to finally equip Muxxybot with a voice synthesis module.
Looking at the waveform, there is a little noise, possibly the humming of my PC, in the background. I first selected the first section where it should be quiet and analyzed the noise profile.
Next, I selected the entire recording by pressing CTRL A and clicked OK to apply the noise reduction across the recording, based on my prior analysis.
A glance at the waveform now shows that there is no noise in the background.
Next, I trimmed the quiet parts at the start and end of the recording, then started to add effects, beginning with changing pitch.
As you can see in the screen grab, you can change settings and then preview before committing to an effect. Next, I added a little echo.
I followed this up with a change in tempo by 10%.
I repeated another echo, using the same settings as before and then applied an effect called PaulStretch, previewing the effect with different settings until I was happy.
The top end of the audio clip was now beginning to distort, as you can see in the following picture.
To remedy this, I once more visited the effect tab, selected Amplify, and reduced it by 5 db. This is the final waveform of the audio clip.
But Muxxy...what good are pictures if we cannot hear Muxxybot's glorious new voice?
Relax, sit back, and listen through each step of the process.
Yes, the picture sucks. It was my first time using Soundcloud. Let me know if you like the idea of Muxxybot narrating his future curation posts and if you like the voice I created for him. I had fun creating it.
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