I was wondering how difficult it would be to get more precise control over the voice volume. Often I like to listen to something while I'm practicing, but still want to be able to hear the voice at a lower volume. Just wanted to see if we could get a sliding bar or something to control volume instead of the basic volume control.

Would anyone else like this as well?

Thanks!

- Brian

I would love to have some volume control, but mainly I have some issues with the sound in general. Often certain syllables will play improperly (with bits cut off) and most neutral-tone syllables still don't have sound files. Also, a good number of useful words don't have whole-word recordings (especially names of provinces and cities).

Let me also take this opportunity to complain about the recording of "bing1". It's much louder than the rest of the samples and very annoying. It would be nice to run all the samples through a processor that evened their levels out. You can do this with Audacity or foobar2000, for example.

James

The new practice page that we're implementing right now has a volume slider and a mute toggle, actually. You won't have to wait too much longer. There will also be a button to replay the word-level audio for each prompt.

The missing neutral tones, clipped sound files, and missing word-level sounds are harder to fix. The sounds were provided by ChinesePod, and we haven't gotten set up to do our own recordings to fill in the gaps. It hasn't been a high priority so far. We'll need to figure something out for Japanese, though, which currently has no sounds; if we can't find a set, we may have to hit the studio.

There are also some other bugs with sounds playing over top of each other and generally not clipping right due to sound quirks in the latest Flash player. I will try to debug these in a couple weeks, once pinyin and definition practice are starting to roll.

James, that's a great idea. We had trimmed and compressed the pinyin syllable sounds, but hadn't though to even the levels. That will take care of the dreaded bing1. We'll see what we can do.