voices
Latest
Details about the new GarageBand Jam Pack: Voices
Yet another minor Apple product announcement that made it under our radar was a new Jam Pack for GarageBand: Voices. No, it isn't samples of Britney Spears, John Mayer and Adam Duritz - it's a collection of over 1,500 new instruments that fall under the categories of Drum and Percussion Instruments, Choral Ensembles, and Soloists. The focus, of course, is on filling up your tool belt with samples of professional instrumental soloists and choirs covering a wide variety of genres and styles.If you want more details on the pack, iCompositions has rummaged through and detailed exactly what you get in this new Jam Pack. Strangely, you get quite a bit more than what Apple advertises - the pack actually contains 1701 loops - and it takes up nearly half the specified hard drive space as well; instead of taking up 3 GB, all those loops only took over a mere 1.7 GB.As with most other Jam Packs, this new Voices pack is available in the Apple Store for the standard Jam Pack price of $99.00.
WoW Insider's PTR voice chat hands on
Voice chat is now available on the 2.2 PTR, so I downloaded the test realms, rolled up a gnome Warlock, and put on my Logitech headset to try it out. What I found was a pretty intuitive voice chat system that does most everything Blizzard promised to do, and will likely replace Teamspeak or Ventrilo for a lot of smaller guilds.Unfortunately, it's complicated enough that it probably won't be extremely widespread-- players who haven't found the need to join up on voice chat yet probably still won't feel a need to do so. But for guilds who don't want to pay for a separate server and friends who group together often, the ingame voice chat should work just fine.The rest of my impressions, including a complete walkthrough on how the chat system works, are after the jump.
The voices of Azeroth
Last week we looked at who made the soundtrack of Azeroth (and I heard-- and saw-- those very people at the Video Games Live BlizzCon concert), and this week, olanthe on WoW Ladies wants to know who's behind the other, very memorable part of WoW's audio: the voices.Unfortunately, just like the music, Blizzard doesn't actually credit the talent part by part, so while it's easy to find a list of who's voiced something in game (the IMDB entry is probably the most comprehensive, as it contains all the names from the booklets to both shipping WoW and Burning Crusade), finding out who's done what is a little harder. Tony Jay did the intros for all the races, and Cam Clarke has been pegged as the male Blood Elf (among others, including Nexus-Prince Shaffar and Medivh). Voice actress Erin Fitzgerald has done quite a few voices in Burning Crusade, including Dorothy and the Wicked Witch, as well as Sarannis and the Essence of Desire in the Black Temple. Kath Soucie, another well known voice actress, has also done voices in BC, as has Michael Dorn (yes, Worf).But most surprising on the list is probably the sheer number of Blizzard employees-- some, like Samwise Didier, Chris Metzen and Mike Morhaime, are well known, but others, like Tracy Bush, Derek Duke, and Glen Stafford, are usually working on the music of Azeroth. And even others-- Michele Arko, and I'm sure a few other names that I just don't recognize, work in completely different departments of Blizzard, from QA to Administration. So it seems like they invite a lot of their local employees to come in and record voices for their games, and not until recently, with the Burning Crusade, have they turned more often to more high profile actors.Unfortunately, that doesn't exactly answer the question of who the female Night Elf is. But especially for the shipping game, odds are that it's someone who works at Blizzard, not a professional voice actor.Update: You guys are the best. A reader of ours is friends with the Night Elf voice, so here she is: Debi Mae West. And yes, her goods really are of the highest quality. Apparently, she was also Meryl in Metal Gear Solid.
Original Transformer voices returning for game
While you were busy eating your Captain Crunch and sitting around watching Transformers in your Underoos in the 80s, Peter Cullen and Frank Welker were busting their humps to make sure that you had the finest in children's programming as the voices of Optimus Prime and Megatron, respectively.Gamespot has reported they'll be back at the grindstone for the upcoming Transformers: The Game, due this summer for pretty much every system on the market. The site also features in-depth interviews with Cullen and Welker to mark the occasion, where we get some insight into how the two voices were created. Needless to say, it's more involved than you probably imagined. Before you click, be aware, the voice of Optimus gushes quite a bit about how talented the guy voicing Megatron is so, if that's going to ruin the series for you (or make it harder to enjoy the latest Transformers fan fiction), you may want to pass.
Wowwee's Spidersapien caught on tape, slings webs
All these videos of Wowwee's quickly-growing lineup of must-have robots has got us quite envious, but still, it's better to see these things caught on tape than never at all, right? One of the firm's first licensed superheros is none other than Spidey himself, and the Spidersapien was able to take a moment from his heroic day to show its stuff for TechDigest. The bot is actually quite different than just a Robosapien with a fancy paint job, as his mannerisms, gait, built-in voice blurbs, and abilities are all straight from the Spider-Man vault. So go on, click through for the live action video of Spidersapien calling out the baddies, waddling about, and of course, slinging that unmistakable web, and start saving now for when these land this summer.
Disney characters get robotic facelift for Magic Kingdom performance
We're hearing January is a fairly good time to hit up Disney World, and if you've got an itch to see giant rodents (and similar) perform on stage with near perfect mouth movements, we'd recommend heading on down. Apparently the engineers behind the relatively new Cinderella Castle stage show at the Magic Kingdom have spruced the characters up quite a bit, and most noticeable is the robotic facelift that the main characters received. Instead of just moving about while music loops in the background, the critters can now sing right along, as their mouths move almost in unison with the audio clips in the show. While we're sure your average six year old girl wouldn't notice such petty details, it's good to see Disney upping the ante on the mechanics to keep us geeks from zoning out while experiencing all that magic, so be sure to hit the read link for a video demonstration of the upgraded jawbones (and don't hum along too loudly).[Via BoingBoing]
Draenei and Blood Elf Voices Leaked
If you're in the mood for more Burning Crusade spoilers, Elüna sent along a page that links to leaked voice files of the Draenei and Blood Elf male and female characters from the upcoming expansion, including their /charge, /silly, and /flirt emotes, and a few others.Personally, I'm not real impressed with the ones I listened to (I have to save a little bit of the new content for the game, right?), but maybe that's because I'd rather hear them in context rather than from leaked .wav files. But a few of them are pretty good, and go a long way towards fleshing out the cultures and personalities of the two new races. True RPers probably won't be real happy about the pop culture references that show up (one of the funnier Blood Elf female /flirts actually makes a pretty good meta-game joke), but these leave little doubt that the same quirky Blizzard charm we're used to is coming with the expansion.And there's one more thing I noticed about one of the voices. This one's really a spoiler, so I'll put it after the jump...[ Thanks, Elüna! ]
