How To Upload Your Audio Files
October 24th, 2007We welcome members to upload their voice audio file depicting how to pronounce a given word or phrase. As long as you are fluent in the language, we will allow you to upload the file of your voice pronouncing it. Phrasebase Admins willl be allowed to edit or re-record any audio files as they see fit.
Here are the steps required to get started, please note, you must follow them exactly, as if you miss a step, you will run into problems.
1) First, DOWNLOAD our Audio Capture Utility. We use the gwave324.zip.
2) Open this zip file named “gwave324.zip” and put all contents into a folder on your hard drive. We recommend here:
c:/Program Files/Goldwave
3) Double click on the GOLDWAVE.EXE file to start the program. We recommend you RIGHT CLICK on this file and issue the command SEND TO > DESKTOP [CREATE SHORTCUT]. Doing this will put an icon on your desktop (assuming you are using Windows) so you can double click it to access the program.
4) Issue the command FILE > NEW. Now this is important, you must start the new file using the following settings…
Bits: 16
Channels: mono
Sampling Rate: 22050
Time: 5 seconds
5) Now, you should see a dialogue box called VOICE CONTROLS. If you dont, turn it on by issuing the command TOOLS > VOICE CONTROLS.
6) You need to have a microphone plugged into your computer. You may be able to use the built-in mic, but we highly recommend you have a seperate one that is plugged in and has a foam covering as to not pick up wind. And you will need to talk directly into it. If you use your laptop builtin mic, locate where it is, and speak clearly and loudly directly into it.
7) On the VOICE CONTROLS dialog box, there will be a RED circle button, this is to start recording. Hit that button once, then record the word or phrase. Select that button again to STOP recording.
8) Select the GREEN arrow button to play back your recording. They key is that you want to speak loud and clear enough so that it creates a nice clean tall graph, but the graph isn’t squashed on the top and bottom. If it’s squashed, then that means it’s too loud and will sound crackly. But if the graph isn’t thick enough, it means it’s too soft. Here is how a nice graph for a given phrase will appear once you record it.
9) But you are not done yet. Now you need to TRIM off the empty space at the start and end of the word or phrase. LEFT CLICK at the location indicated and then RIGHT CLICK to indicate where you want to trim it. Now, you can select the green arrow button again to listen to the audio clip and make sure you are not trimming off too much. (indicentally, the green arrow with the smilie face will play the entire audio track while the plain green arrow only plays the portion that has been selected for trimming).
10) After listening to the track and making sure you are not accidentally clipping off the beginning or end. If it sounds good, then save it to your hard drive as a .wav file.
Then you can upload it to the Phrasebase.com website. It doesn’t matter what name you give it, once you load it to the Phrasebase website, it will change the name of the file automatically.
11) Please note you can find instructions on how to improve the quality of your recordings by going HERE. And once you get good at it, you can then create audio file in batch mode, making it very quick and easy. Go HERE to learn how.
12) Finally, in order to be allowed to upload your audio files, you must confirm that you have read through all the steps above and understand them. PLEASE CLICK HERE to confirm that you have completed all of these steps.
