Audio announcement level

[g1hmo]

Hi all,
I have a couple of mmdvm units that have been working fine for ages, but recently got hold of an FTM-400 and FT-70 YSF radio.
I have set the mmdmv's up to do YSF2DMR and got it working perfectly, one is in the shack using the FT70d, the other with the FTM400 is in the car.
Audio from YSF to DMR is fine in both directions on both hotspots and both radios, but the voice announcement is unbelieveably loud, so much so it is distorted, it took a while to get that it was saying 'unlinked' and 'linked to'.
I also run the shack hotspot on P25, I have noticed on P25 the voice announcements are way to loud too.

Is there any way I can drop the level of them ? the only option I could see in the config is to totally disable them, which is not really any use, particulary for the car one as the voice prompts are almost essential whilst driving.

I am guessing if I can find the audio prompt files, then I could load them into Audacity or such like and reduce the level and re-upload them to the hotspot, but having looked through the folder structure I cannot see anything other than a few .ambe files.
I tried the radios on a friends Openspot, the voice announcement seems fine on that.

[W0CHP]

Is there any way I can drop the level of them ? the only option I could see in the config is to totally disable them, which is not really any use, particulary for the car one as the voice prompts are almost essential whilst driving.

No.

I am guessing if I can find the audio prompt files, then I could load them into Audacity or such like and reduce the level and re-upload them to the hotspot

Nope. They are AMBE encoded files.

but having looked through the folder structure I cannot see anything other than a few .ambe files.

Those *are* in fact the voice announcement files. You can create/edit your own with an AMBE3000 vocoder and G4KLX's AMBEtools: https://github.com/g4klx/AMBETools

In fact, the proper person to contact on these AMBE announcement files, is the upstream developer/provider himself: G4KLX. https://github.com/g4klx

[g1hmo]

Hi,
Thank you fior the explanation, and the suggestions.
I will try and find contact details for G4KLX and drop him an email.

However, having done a bit of testing, I think the whold audio level for everything on YSF2DMR is much too loud, I set the FT-70D to the hotspot frequency using YSF, and linked it to a DMR talkgroup on our local repeater.
Audio on the DMR side is fine,well as fine as DMR can be, but certauinly not overly loud, this is monitoring on a Motorola DP4801 on the same DMR talkgroup as the hotspot is linked to.
The same audio on YSF on the FT-70D at the same time is much too loud, almost distorted, I have confirmed this on 3 MMDVM hotspots, two of them are duplex hotspots, one a single hotspot, it is the same listening on an FTM-400D too.
Oddly though, setting it to YSF2P25 sounds perfect both ways using the same FTM-400 and FT-70D and a Motorola XTS2500 for P25.

[M1DNS]

Now you've moved into differing territory as crossmodes is the work of Andy CA6JAU. Johnathan himself didnt have too much to do with that, but

Yes, whilst there is generally an inbalance in audio between modes the ft70 IMO isnt that great a radio and doesn't help here, in fact i believe it makes things worse.

I owned one for a short while and it went back. audio sounds terrible through it.
My older ft1 and ft2 lineup cope a lot better with audio when crossmoding.

Sent via smoke signals from my SM-G935F M1DNS (Admin)

[g1hmo]

To be honest the FT70 isn't that bad a radio, yes the PC connectivity procedure is a bit of a joke I don't tink that the radio is the issue here, doing YSF2P25 is perfect both ways using the FT70 and the FTM400, but not on YSF2DMR it is way to loud and distorted on both the FT70 and the FTM400.
I've had no luck yet finding a contact email for Jonathan G4KLX, but i've dropped CA6JAU an email, i'm hoping he can advise on whether it is possible to reduce the audio level, failing that i'll ditch the MMDVM units and get a Shark RF openspot, my buddy has one and it sounded much better on that.

[M1DNS]

I think the issue is the announcements are seperate recordings saved as actual ambe files. No audio is actually processed in the mmdvm chain.
So its a digital coded file, 1s & 0s that come out the radio as audio, so im not sure theres much that can be done. Except recording different files for differing modes maybe.

And yep p25 has great audio. It uses much more bandwidth available for its audio meaning its less compressed. Which is why it transcodes quite nicely to DWide modes in fusion.

Sent via smoke signals from my SM-G935F M1DNS (Admin)

[KJ4DHF]

After creating new voice files for pi-star are there any python and php code segments in Pi-Star that would need to be modified/fixed to point those routines to any new IMBE/AMBE voice files.