Hi folks,

As many will have noticed, the backlog of personalisation requests has got a bit unmanageable. This is partly due to a lack of free time and party due to my voice being a bit scratchy and delicate at the moment (nothing serious, just 'one of those things').

Folks have often wondered why we have 2 separate sets of names, one for opponent drivers and one for the 'My Name' list. This is due to the way the my name list recordings work - 24 individual phrases with a name in them which sound nice and natural and work well. The downside of this is the amount of time and work required to make them. There are 200+ outstanding requests do working through all these is easily a weekend's work. With the kids at home all the time this just isn't going to get done.

So, I've created some 'stub' sounds and added all the opponent driver names (nearly 8000 of them) to the My Name list. If you select a My Name entry which has no personalisation recording set the app will assemble one. It does this by appending the selected name to the stub recordings to make the phrases. How well this works depends on the timing and inflection of the driver name. In some cases it'll work well, in other cases it'll be awful, in most cases it'll be somewhere in between.

If you've requested your name to be added and it's not been done, first please accept my apologies for this. Second, when the next CC update is released (version 4.12.0.1, released in the next day or so), please try the My Name list again - your name will almost certainly be there. Select it and restart the app and see how it sounds. Note that the My Name list will allow you to type in it to filter it (otherwise it'd be unusable with nearly 8000 names).

I only have a single collection of personalisation stub recordings. It might be worth adding 3 or 4 versions of these stubs with different timing and / or inflection so users can choose which of the auto-generated sets work best for them, but this is for another day.

If you're interested, the stub recordings are already available with today's sound pack update, they're in c:\Users\[username]\AppData\local\CrewChiefV4\sounds\composite_person alisation_stubs\. The app combines these with the driver name sound to make new entries for your name in c:\Users\[username]\AppData\local\CrewChiefV4\sounds\personalised_mes sages\. If you delete this entry the app will regenerate it as required.

I'd appreciate any feedback on this and will update this thread when the release is done.


TL/DR;

if you're waiting for a My Name entry to added, when today's update goes live your name should be available - it might be a bit robotic but it's worth a try