Productivity
Vox Studio is designed to be a productivity tool for sound engineers who regularly need to produce a very large number of top-quality telecom voice files (but have no time to manually cut, paste and save chunks of sound over and over again). Some of our customers use Vox Studio to produce, literally, tens of thousands of voice files a week. Vox Studio is not another manual sound file editor. There are lots of excellent manual sound editors around if what you are looking for is creativity. If what you are looking for is plain productivity and telecom-specific features, then Vox Studio is what you need.
When you use a traditional sound editor, the amount of time that creeps into the very-repetitive tasks of prompt file recording, cutting, trimming and saving is overwhelming. Most sound editors are good at supporting multimedia file formats, not telecom file formats. This is why Vox Studio's emphasis is on automation, speed and telephony conversions and it does all that on thousands of files with one single command. Basically, Vox Studio does all of the repetitive and boring work automatically but still allows you to do manual tweaking when you want it.
Sound quality
Professional answering services, call centers, voicemail systems, and home banking systems require voice prompts of impeccable quality. Our experience shows (and our users confirm) that the best quality telephony files are obtained by starting from studio-quality recordings which are then converted, using sophisticated algorithms, to the target file format and coding algorithm used by the telephony hardware itself. Direct recording through telephony hardware (and a phone handset) seldom gives acceptable results.
Open approach
Until all hardware and software suppliers agree on a single common file format and coding algorithm for stand-alone or multi-prompt telephony voice files, the diversity of file formats and coding algorithms will continue to be a barrier to development and migration across hardware platforms and software tools. Vox Studio supports many different file formats from different telecom manufacturers, and we will relentlessly continue to add to our file palette as time goes on.
Let's summarize
If you are a computer-telephony professional and you need to record and then trim, normalize and convert 15,000 telephony prompts for next week then Vox Studio is exactly what you need. If you are an audiophile and want to add reverberation to your latest MP3 live show recording, then Vox Studio is probably not the product you are looking for. The accent is on raw productivity, not on artistic creativity.
Now, let's turn to the next chapters and look at what Vox Studio can do for you.