This week, we added eight new multilingual voices to our Voice Library, taking the number of available voices to 1,697!

We also fixed a number of bugs, including:

• An issue with the Assign Task button in Workshop preventing users from assigning a recording to another user;
• A problem with selecting the language for uploaded ads in Power Import;
• Project name disappearing when opening advanced settings in SonicSell;
• Directories with special characters being displayed incorrectly in Files;
• A small scrolling issue affecting users who are a member of many organisations; and,
• some small visual issues affecting Safari users.

You might've noticed, the team have been busy improving the look and feel of AudioStack in the last few weeks, with some new styling added around the Platform. There are more changes still to come, so watch this space 👀

UX Improvements and Bug Fixes in this Release 🐛:

• Fixed a bug where the sound library window would reduce in size while loading;
• Added a button to allow users to "Go to File" directly after uploading a new file;
• Fixed a bug where the pause button wasn't showing correctly on playing voice previews.

🎉 Happy new year from the AudioStack team! 🎉

Over the holidays, we shipped a number of updates, including:

• ✅ Fixed some normalisation issues affecting German voices' pronunciation of numbers;
• ✅ Made some infrastructure improvements to reduce throttling on speech requests and improve the reliability of speech processing;
• ✅ Made some other optimisations to our text-to-speech service;
• ✅ Updated the moods for our sound templates, to make them more reflective of the content and improve the content browsing experience;
• ✅ Improved support for longer content, to reduce timeout issues and improve overall performance when creating audio up to 1 hour in duration.

Stay tuned for some exciting updates to follow in 2025 🚀

• This week, we improved sound template tagging to make it easier to find the right sound in the Sound Library.
  • This includes allowing you to use the new tags as part of filters, as well as updating them in the Sound Library table.
• Improved UX for Recording Booth - we made it easier to record speech in Recording Booth and take your recording over to Workshop as speech to speech. You can now select multiple takes and save them in a single click - your most recent take will automatically be selected in Workshop.
• Based on customer feedback, we fixed "Multilingual" voices to the top of the Voice Library filters, to make it easier to find the voices you're looking for.
• It's now possible to invite a voice actor to record their voice directly from the Voice Library.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a bug with speech-to-speech for ads that came from SonicSell
• Fixed a bug with voice preview playback in Workshop

We try to avoid making breaking changes to our SDKs as much as possible to give people developing with AudioStack as positive an experience as possible. However, sometimes we encounter issues that mean an endpoint is not structured in a way that is optimised for front end developers to integrate with.

Currently, await AS.Content.Script.listProjects(); is supposed to return a Promise<string[]> but instead is returning a much less useful object:

[
{ pk: 'org|AudioStack-1111', sk: 'project|powerimport' },
{ pk: 'org|AudioStack-1111', sk: 'project|recordingbooth' },
{ pk: 'org|AudioStack-1111', sk: 'project|workshop' }
]

This is what the API responds with, but the data that is useful to the end user in this case is the Project name itself:

[
'powerimport',
'recordingbooth',
'workshop'
]

As such, we will be making a breaking change to the Javascript SDK to resolve this issue and return the data in a more user friendly format this week.

❗️

Please note that if you have integrated with the JS SDK /content/list_projects endpoint, you will need to make changes to handle the changing response.

If you have any issues, please get in touch at support [at] audiostack [dot] ai.

This week at AudioStack, we've updated the navigation to make it cleaner and easier to use.

For enterprise customers using custom "whitelabel" headers, we've also added automatic accent colour matching. This means that all accent colours on the Platform will now automatically be matched to your brand's colour scheme, while maintaining our platform-wide accessibility / readability standards.

Another exciting feature we've added is the ability to remove silence from the beginning, end, or all of a given audio file. If needed, you can specify the threshold to make sure small background noises are removed cleanly. Access this feature by going to Files and selecting Audio Tools on a given File page.

Bug Fixes

• Sharing links for assets have now been re-enabled after fixing a bug with permissions

We are excited to announce we have added 1000 new sound templates to the AudioStack platform. These include hundreds of holiday/festive/Christmas sound templates as well as a big variety of other genres.

You can find the new sound templates from any AudioStack workflow or browse them in the Sound Library - and best of all, they all are subject to our standard licence agreement, so can be registered to use them for broadcast. Find out more about how to register an AudioStack for broadcast here.

Platform UX Improvements

• There is now an improved onboarding flow for first time users that will automatically show when you create a new account
• You can also access the Workflow Overview anytime by clicking on your name in the top right, and selecting it from the menu.
• We improved the filter behaviour of the Voice Library to better include multilingual voices.

Workshop Improvements

• We have improved the speech creation process in Workshop, making it easier to create speech-to-speech and easily switch between recordings.
• It's now possible to set the speed of your speech-to-speech in Workshop

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a small issue with File names

🎉 New Feature: IAB Tagging Endpoint! 🎉

We’re excited to introduce our content/recommend/iab_category endpoint! Using this endpoint, you can quickly and reliably tag your script with IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau) v3. categories. There are also 3 layers of granularity, so that you can ensure that your content is ready to meet the perfect audience. Read our Guide and API docs to try it out!

🐛BugFix 🐛

The team at AudioStack just shipped a fix in the Voice Intelligence Layer that automatically removes break tags with a value of 0. Adding a break value of 0 significantly increased artefacts in speech produced. It is generally good practice to add break tags with a value higher than 100ms (<as:break time = "100ms"/>) to avoid distortions.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a bug with asset lengths when importing ads with PowerImport.

SonicSell

• You can now give a SonicSell ad a Project name.

Platform Improvements

• Added Stacks icons to the user invite modal.