I create courses on memrise, and I add audios. I’ve been using the feature through the browser to record myself saying words.
The sound is so inconsistent, however - it’s almost embarrassing. Sometimes my voice is really quiet, while other times it’s inexplicably loud without me even changing anything (I will batch record things and not change a single thing about my setup, yet the inconsistencies happen constantly). I know it has nothing to do with me, because I successfully create recordings for vocabulary words on several other platforms, using the exact same microphone and set up. I only have problems with memrise.
It would be great if you could find a way to normalize the recordings.
p.s. No, I don’t want to record the files on another program on my computer and upload them one at a time to my courses to ensure consistent recordings. If we need to do that, then what’s the point of even making it possible to record ourselves through the browser?
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I suggest recording your commentary separately from your game audio. Then you can edit each one of them separately and never have this problem. Also, I would highly suggest using a compressor and Normalizer on your audio to get it to an more even/consistent volume so that mixing is easier.
Thanks so much for your feedback. As I mentioned in my post, I have no problems making recordings on other platforms and yes, I have also done what you mentioned to add consistant audio to some courses on Memrise.
However my suggestion was for Memrise to do something on their end to make the quality more consistant. As I mentioned, why even make recording through the browser an option if they are just going to be terrible quality?
Again, I have no problems with inconsistancies until I use Memrise. I do recordings on multiple platforms (such as forvo.com - which also lets users make recordings via their browser) and have not had a problem.
I actually wonder as well as to whether Memrise applies some filtering or attempts to “amend” sound files as I also noticed differences between recordings that I used to record with a headset and identical settings.
@MemriseSupport, @ale_c: does Memrise process recordings, i. e. would it be possible that volume, pitch and others are changed by the web application?
Hi all. Can you please confirm which browser(s) you are using? We have had another report recently of sound being distorted/crackled. Does this occur for you too? If you have any of the bad recordings still uploaded to items, it would be great to know the name of your course too
Actually it’s been quite a while since I recorded anything. FWIW, I recall that, back then (~2y ago!) it only worked in one browser, either Firefox or Chrome; there’s tons of messages about this here on the forum though …
You will notice that there’s a huge difference in volume / quality between the recordings that I originally did months ago, verses newer words (added around the time that I made this thread).
For example, under the “G - Other Pronunciations” level [22] , you can hear that there’s a huge difference in volume between older and newer recordings.
Yes, I also experienced a lot of problems with cracking and distortion. Many recordings I had to repeatedly do in order to make them consistent.
I made my recordings in Firefox.
I have recently changed browsers, and I have not tried to make recordings with the new browser. With the last course I made for someone, I simply recorded everything in Audacity and then manually uploaded the audios.
Thank you very much for the details @AxlT. We’ve opened a bug report for this (internal code QA-888) for our QA and Web teams to investigate. In the meantime, we would recommend recording via an external source and uploading the audio as a file. We apologise for the inconvenience of this! Best, Memrise team
