((Note, I realized after originally posting how dangerous a delete command that I employed could be, so I've provided an empty voice directory tree in the attached zip file instead of telling people to run that command. If you just have to know, google "how to delete all files of a certain type recursively in windows.))
From the very start, understand that the folks who built CrewChief have NOT approved/blessed this approach.
Here is a rundown on how to do your own voices. Note that these are text-to-speech voices. The state of tts at the moment, in my mind, is not as good as directly recording all of the comments. Voice inflection, emphasis, etc. just don't seem to be attainable. Just getting a good replication of EPSN's "C'mon, man, c'mon" is a particularly daunting task. Also, what we are doing here will replace all of the wav files in the original build of crewchief, so we start with an empty slate and build our own from scratch and then copy it over once we're satisfied with it (saving the original first, of course).
The attached zip file contains everything you need except Python. It contains two free programs, balcon and sox, the python script to run everything, my voice.txt file (so you don't have to create it from scratch yourself) and a blank voice directory with all of the wav files deleted. Create a folder on your desktop called crewchief_audio and unzip/install balcon and sox into it. We're going to do all of our work in the crewchief_audio folder so this makes it simple to find everything we'll need without having to put in long path names. Put the voice folder, voice.py and voice.txt into it also.
Using a text editor, open the voice.txt file I've included. This file contains all of the comments you want to use. Each comment goes on its own line. The format is main_folder\sub_folder\filename.wav:Audio that you want to hear. For example, here are a couple of lines from mine:
acknowledge\deltasDisabled\1.wav:Okay, no more deltas
acknowledge\deltasDisabled\2.wav:So you don't think you need deltas. Okay then.
acknowledge\deltasEnabled\1.wav:We're going to start giving you deltas
conditions\track_temp_increasing_its_now\1.wav:The track temp is increasing. It's now
The lines can be in any order. The filenames are whatever you want them to be. In the sample above, the comment "Okay, no more deltas" will be recorded in a file called 1.wav, which will then be stored in the \voice\acknowledge\deltasDisabled folder.
Once you have all your comments in the text file, it's time to run it. First, go into voice.py and change the "your_username" chunk to your Windows username. It will parse the file and do all the work. I use Python because I use Python. Someone with powershell experience could probably wrap up a version that wouldn't require python. If you don't have python, you'll have to install version 3 of it and you'll get the script to run with some variation of "python voice.py" depending on your installation of python. It's a "down and dirty" script that doesn't do any error checking, but it does everything in its own folder so there's no danger of it screwing up your original CrewChief if it fails.
Basically, the script opens the voice.txt file and parses out the path and filename and the text that it will send to the tts engine. It uses balcon.exe to make the initial wav file using the default MS voice for your computer. Then it calls the sox program to apply some filters to the audio. You can play with some of these parameters to tune the audio to your taste. The silence command trims dead air space on the front and back of the clip. Highpass will give you the radio-style voice, and tempo speeds up the speech without making it go squeaky. The vol command, which needs to be run separately after everything else is done, increases the volume. Vol will clip, which makes the radio affect a touch better, in my opinion.
Try out some of the wav files to make sure they are what you'd like (don't expect miracles). Once you are satisfied, go to the original CrewChiefV4 directory and rename the voice folder voice.org (we don't want to make a mess of it so put it aside so you can keep it pristine). Then copy the voice folder that you built from the crewchief_audio folder on your desktop to the CrewChiefV4 directory.
Some notes: I THINK that if you name a clip/comment sweary_x.wav that it will only be used if you enable that feature in CrewChief preferences. There are other files in the original build with names other than x.wav. I don't know it they are important or not. But since you can give any comment any filename in the text file, you could match the existing names.
It has not (I repeat, not) been extensively tested. It seems to work for me.
It is NOT approved/blessed by the creators of CrewChief.
