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

Posted By: Dan Fernandez | Feb 14th @ 9:05 AM | 50,239 Views | 4 Comments
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
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#Feb 14th @ 10:24 AM
intelman
intelman
This is pretty sweet!!
#Feb 15th @ 2:47 PM
androidi
androidi

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.

#Feb 15th @ 3:25 PM
Dan
Dan
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 Smiley

#Feb 15th @ 11:48 PM
markheath
markheath
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).
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