Notice
This page show a previous version of the articleContribute audio for Tatoeba
1) You need have a good microphone because we care about sound quality.
2) Download Shtooka Recorder and get familiar with it. You will be using it to record the sentences, it's a very useful software. Here are some video tutorials:
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcJoLBjUOaY (made by AmberShadow).
- http://bit.ly/shtooka (made by CK)
3) Pick a few random sentences (just 2 or 3), 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 if the sound quality is good enough. In your email, let us know as well if you would like to record audio for sentences from a specific user, or from a specific list, so that we can send you sentences that will actually be interesting for you to record.
4) If the quality of your audio is good enough, we will send you back a list of sentences to record. Read the list we sent you and check that all the sentences sound natural to you. If a sentence doesn't sound natural, simply erase it from the list. It would be appreciated if you also went to the website to post a comment on that sentence, to indicate it doesn't sound natural and should be improved.
5) In Shtooka Recorder, copy-paste the final list in the "Words to record", fill in the info in the "Speaker" tab, go back to the "Words" tab and click "Continue".
6) Press space to indicate 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).
7) We used to ask for the files to be in the FLAC format, but this is not the case anymore. Since we use MP3, it would be easier for us if you could send us the audio encoded in MP3. Check that the audios are named properly. They should be named after the id of the sentence (for instance 123.mp3 for the sentence of id 123).
8) Upload your files somewhere and give us the link to download them. We will then include your audio in Tatoeba as soon as possible and will let you know when it is done. We understand it would be more practical if you could record/upload directly from Tatoeba, but we unfortunately don't have time to implement the features for this.
Related link: http://blog.tatoeba.org/2010/04/audio-for-tatoeba-sentences-in.html