Voice Candy

Potion Factory and Leopard

Andy Kim — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 16:25:57 -0700

I just released Voice Candy 1.2 with Leopard compatibility. It actually took more work than I anticipated, but it's finally done and it even has a 512 by 512 pixel icon now. As usual for a .1 release, it is a free upgrade so if you're a Voice Candy user, you should get it.

Tangerine!, however, is taking longer than expected due to DRM protected song support. For the time being, if you are a Tangerine! user, I suggest filtering out protected songs using the rules in Tangerine!'s preferences. It works OK otherwise though. My original plan was to have both apps ready today, but at this point I'm hoping to bring full Leopard compatibility to Tangerine! by the end of next week.

Leopard looks pretty sweet and I hope a lot of you get it because my next app will be Leopard only. It is just too hard to pass up new technology in Leopard for the sake of Tiger compatibility.

Tangerine! and Voice Candy Updated

Andy Kim — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 00:17:54 -0700

Tangerine! just got a minor update but for some it could be a big deal. That's because it is now localized to Japanese and that includes even the online documentation. Our Japanese distributor, ACT2, have been a great help with these.

Voice Candy had been localized to Japanese for a while but it now includes the translated online documentation as well.

If you are Japanese and bought the software untranslated, thank you. I'm so sorry that it took so long. ごめんなさい!

Email Voice Candy Recordings as MP3

Jin Kim — Sat, 30 Dec 2006 01:35:41 -0800

One of the feature in Voice Candy is the ability to add custom AppleScript actions to interact with different applications. One action that I think Voice Candy users might find handy is an action to send email with the recording in MP3 format. Currently, Voice Candy only records to the QuickTime movie format and so the "Send Email" action sends the recording as a .mov file which might not be accessible for recipients on PCs without QuickTime installed.

So, in this post I would like to show you a way to send emails with MP3 recordings by using an AppleScript action.

First, you need to download the following AppleScript file:

Once you have the file, open Voice Candy's actions preference:

Hit the "Add Action" button and you will be presented with the following sheet:

Hit the "Choose AppleScript..." button and select the AppleScript file that you have just downloaded.
Enter the name for this action and hit "Save".

You will now notice that a new action "Email as MP3" is available from the list of actions:

Now record something then perform the "Email as MP3" action. Tada:

Hope you find this post useful. Best wishes in the year 2007.

Update (01/14/07):

You can also make a slight modification to the script file to perform different operations such as saving to Desktop:

Licensing Scheme Switch

Andy Kim — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 15:43:55 -0800

Announcement

With the release of Tangerine! we moved to a new licensing scheme across all of our applications. If you upgrade Podcast Maker or Voice Candy and all of a sudden find that it thinks that you are not registered and your trial has expired, it is because you need to put in your new license key. We emailed them out ahead of time, but you may not have gotten it for one reason or another. In that case, please go here to retrieve your license.

But... Why?

So why would we go through the eye-poking pain of updating every order in the database, not to mention having to write code that we don't enjoy writing? Well, there are several reasons why it's all justified. With Podcast Maker we wrote code first and asked questions later. Thus, when we were done with the code, we looked to Kagi as the best solution to quickly take the product to market. We had to abandon them to our own custom store eventually, but it was... sufficient... at the time. The attractive thing about Kagi was that they provided us with a ready to go licensing code. We knew that it was a generic solution that is easier to reverse engineer, and we were proven right recently. A leaked license key can be blocked, but a new license key generated by the crackers is a different game altogether.

With the release of Voice Candy we moved to a license file based system while still accepting the old Kagi license keys in Podcast Maker. While it is cool and some people do prefer the convenience of just double clicking a file to register, it proved to be a burden on us support wise. Most of the times, it wasn't even the users' fault or ours. Some email servers classify email as spam more readily if it contains attachments of unknown extensions and others block it altogether. Some email clients such as Eudora do not even allow file extensions longer than 20 characters, rendering the license file useless for the user, and sometimes even turning the user into a mad and angry user.

So in the end, we are back to issuing license keys but generated with our own algorithm. I'm hoping that the crackers will leave us alone for now (uhm... because we are nice guys?), but I get a feeling that that's just wishful thinking.

Voice Candy 1.1

Andy Kim — Tue, 08 Aug 2006 11:55:23 -0700

Voice Candy 1.1 is out!

The major new feature in this release is the voice note manager. After recording a clip, use the Save as Note action. After that you can access the recording through the Notes window (⌘3) that looks like this:

It should be self explanatory, but here are a few things that might not be obvious:

You can change the playback rate. You can vary the playback rate between 0.5 to 2.5 times the original speed. This should be a big help to those who use Voice Candy to record meetings or lectures. This will allow you to review it much faster or examine specific portions in detail. The great thing about this feature is that it does not affect the pitch despite the speed change. Incidentally, holding down the next button will also fast forward through the recording.
You can perform actions on these notes. You do so through the Actions menu or by control-clicking them.
You can rename a note by clicking on its title. Double click plays it
You can control the volume with your mouse wheel (and if you didn't know already, a bonus tip: you can adjust the clock in the remind action with the mouse wheel too)
Although these are called "Notes", feel free to record much longer clips and save it here.

The other new feature of this release is the ability to monitor the recording--you can now listen to the effects live as the program is recording. Laptop users shouldn't record from the built-in mic and monitor using the built-in speakers though, as that is a sure way of getting feedback noise. You can set the monitor device in Voice Candy's Recording Preferences.

All in all, we're proud to offer you this significant upgrade for free.

Voice Mail

Andy Kim — Sat, 27 May 2006 06:36:36 -0700

A Mr. Randy Harris comments about Voice Candy at MacUpdate:

I've been using Voice Candy for a few weeks now and I really like it a lot. I bought it with the intention of using it like a voice version of Apple's PhotoBooth, which my kids love.

After using it a little I quickly realized that Voice Candy is about the best and easiest to use Voice eMail program that I've run across.

This put a broad grin on my face because while the effects are cool, we really wanted to make a general purpose voice recorder that is useful in addition to being fun. It is satisfying to see someone reaching that conclusion.

In any case, there actually is something helpful in this post.

If you are sending voice emails (or really just any attachments), like Mr. Harris here, and some of your recipients are Windows users, you will want to do this in Mail.app:

If you don't do that, Mail.app will send two attachments: a "Recording.mov", which is the real thing, and a "._Recording.mov"—what we have come to call the "shadow file".

"Uhm, Randy... I get no sound?", will be the response you get invariably because for some reason, they never click on the real file first. Part of the reason is because the shadow file shows up first in the attachments list. The other reason I won't say out loud.

So what is this shadow file? Why is it there? Well, the file contains resource fork data. Windows users have no use for it, and frankly, I don't think Mac users have much use for it either these days.

[ Desktop image, "Where Real Work Happens", courtesy of Veer ]

Voice Candy Tip

Andy Kim — Fri, 12 May 2006 20:45:17 -0700

Here is a tip for you Voice Candy users. The nice thing about the reminder clock is that you can easily set the time with just a click since it moves the hour hand to the position of the click. The downside is that you cannot drag the minute hand. You can however still adjust the minute hand by using your mouse scrollwheel. A bonus tip: When you are typing in the time and date, some characters will move the input focus to the next part. Those characters are: ; : / . , - in addition to the tab and left and right arrow keys. I personally find the period to be the most convenient because I use the numpad.

Voice Candy Featured at Apple.com

Andy Kim — Sat, 06 May 2006 05:23:36 -0700

Voice Candy is featured at Apple's download page and also in its audio category page.

This reminds me of the time we released Podcast Maker because it also made the featured download. My hands were so sore because we high-fived more than science ever thought was possible (Yes, I stole that line from Panic.)

Thank you Apple. Again!

http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/

Voice Candy 1.0 Released

Andy Kim — Thu, 04 May 2006 03:33:41 -0700

Our second product was just released after much hard work.

Voice Candy