Hi Joe,

Thanks for the submission.  

To improve your recordings and get rid of the 'crackling' or  'lip smacking', you might try putting your microphone a little further away from your mouth, and correspondingly increasing your recording volume.  What I find is when you do this, the 'crackling' and 'lip smacking' noises don't seem to be as pronounced.  I also sometimes have to watch to volume of my speech - and try to control it that way.

There is a little bit of hiss in the background of your recordings that I have removed using Audacity's noise removal effect.  However, if you turn up the volume higher than normal upon playback, Audacity just seems to replace the hiss with 'space age' sounds.  I'll need to experiment with Audacity's filtering to get the right approach to remove this hiss.  Is there anything in your environment that might be causing this hiss (air conditioner, computer fan, etc.)?

I've added your audio to the svn tree (see http://www.dev.voxforge.org/browser/VoxForge/Trunk/Audio/Original/48kHz%3A16bit/jaiger-10212006) and will be creating a updated acoustic model (using your speech audio) shortly.

thanks, 

Ken 

I believe the hissing is due to my recording settings.  In trying to get my levels between 0.5 and 1.0 in Audacity I settled on enabling 20db gain in my audio mixer.  When turning on this setting I noticed hissing in my headset.  Enabling this gain probably also contributed to crackling and lip-smack.

Environment: The only computer in the room was my laptop - it was very quiet, TV/stereo was off, kids were asleep, wife was out, dog in basement, dishwasher off, AC is central air and I couldn't hear it.  I even turned off all but the lights I needed to read my prompts - I've heard some lights make buzzing sounds.

One of these days I'll record a submission without the 20db gain and you can tell me if the hiss is better.  The downside might be that my Audacity levels are lower.

-joe