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Contribute audio for Tatoeba

Eventually, we hope to have a streamlined process for uploading audio to Tatoeba. At the moment, our procedure involves a number of manual steps for both the people who record and the admin who uploads your files.

If you want to record, you must have a good microphone because sound quality is important.

Audio recorder tools

There are two audio recorder tools specialized for recording audio for Tatoeba: Shtooka Recorder and swac-recorder. Both were developed by the same person, zmoo. If you will be recording on Windows, use Shtooka, which has been verified as running on at least the following platforms: Windows XP and Windows 7, and for which we have both instructions and videos. We do not as yet have instructions or videos for swac-recorder.

For information about installing and using Shtooka, see Using Shtooka Recorder. For information about installing swac-recorder, see Using swac-recorder.

Installation instructions

1) You need to have a good microphone because audio recorded for Tatoeba must have high sound quality.

2) Download one of these audio recorders:

  • Shtooka recorder:

    • download the installer

    • get familiar with the tool via video tutorials:

      • youtube.com/watch?v=AcJoLBjUOaY (made by AmberShadow).
      • bit.ly/shtooka (made by CK) = video and documentation

or

  • swac-recorder:

3) Pick a few random sentences (just two or three), record them, and send us the samples at team@tatoeba.org, with the title "Audio for Tatoeba in language_name". This way we can evaluate whether the sound quality is good enough.

4) If we tell you that the quality of your audio is good enough, you can go ahead and record audio for more sentences. Verify that all the sentences sound natural to you. If a sentence doesn't sound natural, post a comment on it.

Using Shtooka Recorder to record audio for the site

1) In Shtooka Recorder, copy-paste the final list into the "Words to record", fill in the info in the "Speaker" tab, go back to the "Words" tab and click "Continue".

2) Press the space bar to indicate that you are ready, and read the sentence that is highlighted in red. The software will detect when to start and stop recording, and will jump to the next sentence automatically. All you have to do is read what's highlighted in red. If you want to take a break, you can press space to pause, so that it doesn't record something unrelated. If you need to listen to a sentence's audio, simply select it and press "Enter". (You can navigate with the directional keys: up, down, left, right.)

3) Save the audio files in MP3 format, converting them if necessary. Verify that the files are named properly. They should be named after the id of the sentence. For instance, the audio file for the sentence with id 123 should be named 123.mp3. (Note that we used to ask for the files to be in FLAC format, but this is no longer the case.)

4) If you can upload your files somewhere, please do, and give us the link to download them. If this is not possible, send the files by e-mail to team@tatoeba.org. We will then include your audio in Tatoeba as soon as possible. Eventually, we hope to make it possible to record/upload directly from Tatoeba.

Related link: http://blog.tatoeba.org/2010/04/audio-for-tatoeba-sentences-in.html

Contact for additional help

If you want to record for the project and need additional help, please contact me via http://tatoeba.org/eng/private_messages/write/CK and I'll try to help you.

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