Earlier this week, we released a couple of updates to the AudioStack platform, including:

• Redesign of the Voice Library - it's now easier than ever to find a voice in the AudioStack library.
• Mobile support for the Voice Library - browse voices from your smartphone. Simply open the page in your browser.

• Custom Length in Workshop - you can now specify how long you want an asset created in workshop to be.

• Fixed a bug with sorting in the Voice Library.

This week, the AudioStack team have been busy levelling up the capabilities of AudioStack API. We're excited to announce a new feature in Production - atmospheric sound design.

You can check out an example of what's possible below, the full tutorials will be landing shortly 🚀

We also did some maintenance to improve performance of the speech/voice endpoint and speech/voice/recommendation endpoint, as well as fixing a bug with load balancing in response to customer feedback.

This week in SonicSell, we added a couple of improvements to the ad generation experience.

• You can now "Start Over" to create a new ad; and,
• Voice selection is now more variable when gender and tone are pre-selected, improving the quality of voice recommendations.

We also improved the Voice Library by giving each voice its own page, so now you can link people directly to a specific voice in the library using the URL.

Some of our documentation has also had an update...

• We added more explanations and a better structure to “how does audiostack work”
• Added an errors page aimed at API users
• Enhanced the Getting Started page as well including adding a “what is a RESTful API” explanation.

SonicSell improvements

• Added some new example templates to the model to give the script generation even more expert guidance
• Length adjustments -> percentage of too short ads decreased from 50% to 15% 🚀
• Prompt refinements that should lead to less normalization errors

Infrastructure improvements

• Upgraded our user permission management system - should lead to less errors for our customers 😀
• Fixed a billing error on Speech to Speech 💰

JS SDK 1.1.13:

• Handle 200 & 202 responses correctly for STS (speech to speech)

This week, we added Speech-to-Speech to the AudioStack Platform, so you can now use this functionality without needing to write any code. Simply upload a speech file and select a voice, and you'll be able to generate synthetic speech that mimics your recording. Find out more in our guide: https://docs.audiostack.ai/docs/speech-to-speech

SonicSell

We also added a few improvements to SonicSell, including:

• Improved script editor performance; and,
• Fixed a bug encoding special characters.

As always, if you have any questions or feedback, please get in touch at support [at] audiostack [dot] ai.

Today we added a guide to make it easier to understand how organisations and users work at AudioStack, to help with getting the right role based access to workflows and resources.

Read more here.

We're also pleased to announce we added 15 new Japanese voices to the library in response to users' feedback.

Exciting news! You might've noticed that we recently took SonicSell v1.6.0 out of beta and made it available to all AudioStack users. SonicSell has undergone some major UX improvements as well as some exciting feature additions.

What's new?

• Improved ad quality: We’ve improved the length of ads to fit better, and the content of ads themselves.
• Improved UX: Based on feedback from users, we’ve made SonicSell easier to use than ever before. Create an ad in a single click, customise your ad by shaping your recommendations with a mood and tone of voice, or choose a voice and sound design for yourself.
• Give your ad a cover to make it stand out.
• All ads are now saved to your organisation’s library, so you can easily return to them later, and to enable collaborative editing. This also makes it easier to find your ads - search by name or content.
• Edit your ad in the workshop: Tailor your ad to fit a specific audience or a brand tone of voice, or enhance your ad. You can also create an ad from scratch in the Workshop using your own script.
• Create an ad with no sound design: This is perfect for situations where you want to download just the voice, to combine with other audio in a DAW or video editing software.

There are even more features still to come - watch this space for updates in the coming weeks. For the next few weeks, the old version of SonicSell will stay available alongside the new version. We will deprecate this at some point in the near future, so please try out the new version and let us know ASAP if there is anything you could do on the old version but aren’t able to do here.

You can find our complete user guide here: https://docs.audiostack.ai/docs/sonicsell-v160

• Feature in SonicSell: We added the ability to create an audio advert without sound designs 💯
• Updates placeholder text for sonicsell and workshop 💯
• We made bug fixes in our logging for data sharing.
• https://audiostack.ai is now compliant with cookie regulations! 🔒
• We improved the reliability of our VAST server by over 20x - contact your account manager for details about this.

Bumper improvements 🚀

We made a bumper set of improvements this week 💯

Better sound quality with media files

•  We enhanced the mastering sidechain compression for music using media as key signal, allowing to combine File Manager with TTS audio in the mix in a leveled way. This enables better sound quality in more situations 😀

API Bug Fixes

• 🐛We made some improvements to the Audio Evaluation Service bugfixes
• Better Errror handling improvements when Files were Not found ⚠️

Platform fixes and bug fixes

• 🚀 Rebranding of Audio Playground to Workshop
• 🐛We fixed a bug to always show org switcher
• 💚We fixed the "you are not authorised" flashing when page loads
• 🐛 fixed re-rendering in asset card and a bug with the play button
• 🐛fixed indexed Db error when db is manually deleted
• 🚀 We added new icons to the platform add-new-icons-to-platform
• 🐛 We fixed some bugs in the library
• 🐛 fixed ghost card bug

Platform and SDK features and improvements

• 💯 SDK for Suite endpoints, long polling and error handling. You can check it out now in the Python SDK
• 💯 added lazy mode to asset cards to enhance the customer experience
• 💯 Added pagination to library so now it will load faster 🐎
• 🐛 fixed conditional for play button icon in asset card
• 🐛 We updated default sound design to soiree_a_illangeacross all workflows

JS SDK v1.1.11

We improved the JS SDK and launched a new version https://www.npmjs.com/package/@aflr/audiostack

• Integration with STS (speech to speech) Endpoints:

• https://v2.api.audio/speech/sts/voices (GET to get a list of speech to speech voices available)

• https://v2.api.audio/speech/sts (POST to start an sts pipeline)

• https://v2.api.audio/speech/sts (GET to get the status of the pipeline launched)

Performance improvements 🚤

Speed improvements for SonicSell, which was causing some errors

1. Reducing deployment package size of ms-script. ~600ms faster.
2. Calls to recommend mood/gender/tone in parallel, saves 4-5 seconds.
3. We reduced cold starts in our infrastructure also yielding up to 1.8 seconds saving.

This should make your experience much faster 🚤

Today we added a new guide to our documentation, to help AudioStack Platform users understand the different advanced Audio Tools that are available in the Files view, inside Resources > Content. Audio Tools include an evaluation service to check the quality of uploaded files, a denoiser, and stem separation to allow you to extract voice and music from any uploaded file.

Find out more: https://docs.audiostack.ai/docs/audio-tools.