Designed for use by voice artists producing IVR prompts and narrating e-learning projects, PromptBuddy records and automatically trims voice prompts from scripts. It works and is beyond simple to use. However, it does have limitations that may make it unsuitable for some projects. It does not compare to similar products like, for example, Word2WAV. It’s also a bit fiddly to use as a result of its compromises.

On the other hand, it’s inexpensive and does what it’s designed to do.

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No wonder — the engineer is probably focused on how many whizzy-cool features s/he can invoke per second, and this can be give the talent a false impression. So here are the top ten objections to Pro Tools and my response to each. Read the rest of this entry »

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Microsoft has applied for a broad patent covering, among other things, using holography in remote meetings. That’s right, in the future according the MS, we’ll all be talking to holograms of our co-workers. How we’ll do it, what the hardware and software will look like, is still vague. But they’ll figure it out, and it will be so much better than what we have.

Videoconferencing? That’s so twentieth century. WebEx? Nah, that’s Twitter with pictures. Telepresence? Another Web-two-point-oh gee-gaw. Nope, MS looks to commercialize George Lucas’ ideas from a long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. And they’ve filed a patent to cover it.

Can’t you see it now? A hologram of Dom Portwood appears outside your cubicle: “Yeah. It’s just that we’re putting new coversheets on all the TPS reports before they go out now. So if you could go ahead and try to remember to do that from now on, that’d be great.”

Gives a whole new meaning to the term “blue screen of death,” doesn’t it? But wait, there’s more: Why, we could have voiceover sessions where we’d actually have to look at the client! You’ll be able to read their body language as you finish the 14th take and wait for yet another line read completely different from the last one!

You can read about the future today (!) in this piece from Network World.

This month we take a look at several embedded audio players for use in HTML websites, as well as for those based on blogging software like WordPress. Nearly all of these players require MP3-formatted audio players to work, although some will play other formats as well. The players themselves are based on Adobe’s Flash technology combined with some Java scripting.

The reason for this is simple; nearly 97% of all online users have Adobe’s Flash player already installed on their computers, and almost all modern browsers know how to handle javascript properly. Using Flash insures that your clients will be able to hear your demos without the annoyance of having to stop and install yet another plug-in in their web browser.

In short, you need good content and good participation from other sites (in other words, incoming links) to get good results from Google. Got that? Good.

I’ve scored a copy of iZotope’s RX noise reduction plug-in, and so far, it’s sweet. It’s a standalone program that lists for $349 USD, substantially less than the current crop of third party noise reduction plugs. What’s more, RX offers five distinct modules: a de-clipper, a de-clicker, a de-noiser, hum removal, and spectral repair, all in one interface. And quite the interface it is, with the buttons for each modules at the lower left of the interface.

Actually the nice folks at iZotope have given me a full copy of RX Advanced, which retails for about $1200. While it’s nice to have, I can already tell that I’ll do most of my work using the “simpler” controls that come with the regular edition. Here’s the main screen: Note the two overlaid displays — the blue is the waveform showing you amplitude over time, while the orange stuff is a frequency spectrogram, with low frequencies at the bottom and higher frequencies at the top of each track. The brighter the orange, the greater the frequency’s amplitude. Makes it easy to pick out noises.

The long and short of RX is that if you need it, you really need it. So much better than the others, and the regular edition is a screamin’ deal in comparison to the competition. See the review at RAP’s website here.

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But it’s nearly 2007, a year I wasn’t sure I’d even see. So here early in the 21st century, it occurs to me that the blog is one of the preferred forms of over-communication. Therefore, I must pursue it.

Welcome to my blog.

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