• 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.

Platform UX improvements

• When you type or copy and paste a project name in Workshop, spaces will now be replaced by underscores, so you don't need to worry about removing them.
• It's now possible to drag and drop a file into Files and preview/ categorise it with ease.
• You can also now add categories for your uploaded files at the point of upload.

Bug Fixes

• When you improve your script with AI in Workshop, we have restored the ability to update just the tone of voice or target audience, without updating the other.
• Fixed a bug in Workshop where the voice speed was not updating the estimated length.

In this week's release, we added a few new features to the Platform:

Register your asset for broadcast

You can now register an asset for broadcast (Enterprise customers only). To get permission to broadcast an asset produced with AudioStack, you can now go to the Projects area and click Share, to obtain an ID number which acts as evidence of your right to broadcast.

Open an uploaded File in Workshop, and combine it with TTS

From the Files area, it's now possible to open a File in Workshop, and use this alongside your TTS. This enables you to do a few important things:

• Upload a sound effect and use this in your advert
• Combine TTS with speech-to-speech
• Upload a jingle and have this play at the start of your ad

Controlling the timing of when your File plays in Workshop requires no technical audio knowledge - simply type your text-to-speech before or after the long tag that is pasted in the text box (without deleting or changing any of the tag itself). If you type text before the tag, you will hear synthetic speech, followed by your media file. If you type text after the tag, you will hear the media file, followed by synthetic speech. You can also place speech on both sides of the File, or including multiple media files by copying over the script tags (above) and pasting them into the text box along with your script.

We also fixed some bugs and improved the UX of Workshop, such as disabling the script text area when STS or media is selected (as changing the script doesn't impact the content of the ad in this case), and maintaining the script length when you click on "enhance my script with AI".

SonicSell

• We redesigned the Advanced Controls in SonicSell to make them more user friendly and consistent with the update to Workshop released last week!

Platform

• We added a chatbot to the Platform so you can more easily contact support if you have any issues. It can be found in the bottom right of the screen.

UX Improvements

• Sorted filters alphabetically in the voice library
• Improved confusing button copy in Recording Booth
• Workshop will now consider break tags in estimated script length to give better accuracy
• Hid pagination when there's only one page of results
• Improved the styling of waveforms in Workshop and SonicSell

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a bug with sharing audio in SonicSell
• Fixed an issue with asset title being encoded twice when sharing
• Added an error message for when a file ID cannot be loaded in the Files area
• Fixed a bug where a "no permissions" error appeared on loading the Homepage for some users
• Fixed an issue where forward slashes were missing when creating subfolders in Files