Marble/VoiceOfMarble/Recording

Audacity is an open source audio recorder. It's a good choice to do your voice recordings for Marble. Of course it's also possible to use different software if you want to.

Initial Setup

Ask your system administrator to install audacity on your system if it's not installed yet. Audacity is available in any sane Linux distribution. Versions for Mac and Windows exist as well.
Connect your microphone to your system
Start audacity

Voice Sample Recording

Get another voice sample to speak from the translations page
Press the record button in audacity
Speak the text
Press the stop button
Play the spoken text. If it's not ok, record it again
Cut any excessive silence at the start and the end
Normalize the voice sample (effects menu)
Export the voice sample (File, Export) as ogg vorbis. See the translations page for the filename

Alternative Voice Sample Recording method

Get the list of the voice samples to speak from the translations page
Press the record button in audacity
Speak a line of text
Pause for 2 seconds
Speak another line of text, etc
When you're done, hit the stop button
Play the whole file, stop when you think you must record again
Select the part of the recording to record again
Hit Generate > Silence to remove the recording
Press the record button to record again in another track
When you're done, export this as a single ogg file to merge all the tracks
Open this file and run Sound finder in Analyse
Change the values until you get 64 labels matching the recordings
Run Multiple export, select ogg vorbis, the folder to export to (that we call [AUDACITY_FILES_DIR]) and hit Export
Download the File:Marble-voice-files-name.sh.tar.gz script, extract and chmod a+x marble-voice-files-name.sh
./marble-voice-files-name.sh [AUDACITY_FILES_DIR] [MARBLE_FILES_DIR]
Your files are ready with the proper names in [MARBLE_FILES_DIR]

Tips

Make sure no other sound disturbs your recordings.
Repeat several recordings to find the optimal volume setting of the microphone
Sometimes it's easier to speak longer sentences or to repeat the same text several times and to cut the recordings afterwards
Don't record everything in one go, but make smaller breaks between. Try to avoid longer breaks though (e.g. lunch).
Don't rush. Quality recordings take their time

Tips for a good speaker

Smile a bit while speaking (but don't overdo it). Your voice will sound friendlier and more vivid as a result.
Try to speak clearly so that it's easy to understand your voice while driving.
Think about proper intonation of samples that are supposed to get concatenated.