Coding4Fun Demo - How to mask your voice using the Skype Voice Changer

Posted: Feb 14, 2009 at 9:05 AM

By: Dan Fernandez

(1)

59,019 Views

4 Comments

Video format

Option selected may change based on video formats available and browser capability.

Auto

Use our suggested format for this video.

Smooth Streaming

Adaptive bitrate streaming - little buffering but lower video quality at times of low bandwidth. Silverlight 5 required

Progressive

Traditional buffered video format. Silverlight 5 required

HTML5

For browsers that support H.264 MP4 or WebM video playback such as:
IE9+, Firefox 4+, Chrome 5+, or Safari 4+.

Flash

For browsers that have the Adobe Flash Player plugin installed.

Mark Heath (of NAudio fame) recently published a how-to article for Coding4Fun that shows how he plugged into Skype's audio APIs to dynamically apply different sound effects to the audio stream to mask your voice.

To see it in action, we setup a Skype connection between me and Clint Rutkas. Clint screen captured his PC so you can see the Skype Voice Changer application, while I recorded Clint's voice with the sound effects applied.

Coding is fun Smiley

Follow the Discussion

Follow
Oops, something didn't work.

Try again?

Sign In to be begin to follow these comments

What does this mean?
Following an item on Channel 9 allows you to watch for new content and comments that you are interested in. You need to be signed in to Channel 9 to use this feature.

Getting "follow" information

Stop following these comments

Start following these comments

What does this mean?
Following an item on Channel 9 allows you to watch for new content and comments that you are interested in and view them all on your notifications page.

Removing your "follow"

Setting up your "follow"

Did you know you can
sign up for email notifications?
- Subscribe to this comments

intelman

Feb 14, 2009 at 10:24 AM

This is pretty sweet!!
androidi

Feb 15, 2009 at 2:47 PM

Ummmh doesn't it make much more sense to use the windows apis to do this so it works with any application intead of just skype or am I missing something here? Oh that's right when it comes to doing anything audio related with .NET the most MS can come up with is something that sends a filename to a native api to play an audio file. It's up to 3rd parties to get anything useful going with .NET.
Dan

Feb 15, 2009 at 3:25 PM

Ummmh doesn't it make much more sense to use the windows apis to do this so it works with any application intead of just skype or am I missing something here?
That's exactly what Mark's NAudio library (linked to above) does, he just reused the libraries for Skype. It's designed for reuse.

I agree with you that we should have better managed audio APIs. I'll also add that we need better video APIs like managed DirectShow. That being said, if you look at the top feedback by customers, requests for audio APIs is almost non-existent. If you submit a feature request, let me know and I'll vote it up
markheath

Feb 15, 2009 at 11:48 PM

Yes, the included effects can be used with pretty much any audio. I don't have any friends on Skype so it took me ages of pleading on facebook & twitter to find someone willing to let me call them and talk in a silly voice.

I would like to see some good managed audio APIs (or at least 'official' wrappers for the multitude of unmanaged ones), but as Dan says, there does not seem to be a lot of interest in it at the moment. Still, the number of .NET audio related open source projects is gradually growing (check out VST.NET and livefft for two good examples on CodePlex).