Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!agate!ziploc!eps
From: eps@toaster.SFSU.EDU (Eric P. Scott)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: GuidedTour audio
Message-ID: <1074@toaster.SFSU.EDU>
Date: 24 Dec 90 23:53:26 GMT
References: <90349.130952SLVQC@CUNYVM.BITNET> <Dec.15.15.30.18.1990.17141@remus.rutgers.edu> <1055@toaster.SFSU.EDU>
Reply-To: eps@cs.SFSU.EDU (Eric P. Scott)
Organization: San Francisco State University
Lines: 26

> But who supplied the voice?

I received a couple of e-mail responses, this is from a NeXT
employee who wishes to remain anonymous, published here with
permission:

|Her name is Elaine Clarke, she's a professional "voice talent" from  
|the [San Francisco] Bay Area who NeXT hired [...] for the job.

That's trivia.  Here's the interesting part:

|Some interesting production notes about the making of GuidedTour:  We  
|recorded her voice directly onto DAT at a nearby studio.  We then  
|dumped the entire contents of the DAT into the NeXT using a  
|Digidesign DATA I/O box plugged directly into the DSP port.  All of  
|the editing and mixing of the soundtrack was done using SoundWorks  
|(tm) from Metaresearch.  We first "boiled down" the raw voice track  
|to eliminate the false takes, then re-timed the pauses and phrases to  
|match the scratch voice track recorded in the original Show and Tell  
|script.  Finally, we mixed in sound effects (all the mouse clicks and  
|keyboard typing were added after the fact) and music generated by the  
|Ensemble demo program.  As a finishing touch, we ran sndcompress to  
|reduce the size of the final sound files -- I think we got about a  
|6:1 compression factor in that step.

					-=EPS=-