Salamadra Radio stated features include:
- Special tracks, like time announcements and random audio files from a folder.
- A versatile events scheduler, for audio files or starting/stopping playback, at an scheduled day and time or periodically, like days of weeks or hours.
It's not very clear to me if voice-tracking can be achieved or not in Salamadra.
Can it?
By voice tracking do you mean making tracks like announcements or station Id's with your own voice? If that's what you mean then yes you can make a voice track with a voice recorder in high quality setting that records/stores files in MP3 and then you transfer the track(s) to your computer, schedule when you want that to play from the folder with Salamandra.
I have an announcement with my own voice at the top of each hour...."relive the golden age of radio with old time dramas and the best oldies. you are tuned to AM 1630".
I have a 6 or 7 second jingle each 15 minutes with jingles I made from imagingthing.
I think he means playing a specific audio file after each song, identifying the song.
I don't believe that Salamandra will do this.
You would still have to record the voice track in any event, which can be time consuming unless you have a really short playlist (and that's kind of anti-Part 15 anyway).
I use TTS (Text to Speech) to automatically generate the voice track, and do some preprocessing to append it to the music track itself. I also take advantage of the preprocessing to normalize the track, and standardize the mp3 and/or ogg bit rate, as well as chop off leading and trailing silence. There are various tools to accomplish all this via batch files.
AI is text to speech too.What do you mean you "do some preprocessing to append it to the music track itself"? I understand voice-tracking as basically.. yeah, where the data is read from the mp3 file and the song automatically announced from it. I don't exactly know.
In a batch program...
I use the name of the music file to generate the TTS mp3 file. A bit of a kludge, but it works. I don't use AI for anything.
I normalize the music file using ffmpeg. I also chop any extraneous silence from the beginning and end of the file.
I then append the TTS mp3 to the music file mp3. Basically, the voice tracking is at the end of the music file.
Finally, I reencode the music file & voice tracking to a standard bit rate.
I used to go through a bit of a process to do the TTS on the fly as I was playing the music file. I would then play the TTS after the music file finished. But it was a real pain to synchronize things up; there were race conditions, as I was using a Windows app for the scheduling (every minute). And it relied on the fact that all music files were greater than 1 minute in length.
My new method works far better.
I actually did publish a post on how I did the voice tracking on the fly; it was either here or at the late and lamented ALPB Forum (now MBCF).
@artisan-radio I'll have to look that up, I still don't quite understand what you mean by "I then append the TTS mp3 to the music file mp3." I just did a quick search and it seems to suggest the two somehow become a single file.. it was quite confusing.