help please with a DS and those awful voice files

[specmaster]

Hello, I have just aquired one of these units which I thought was the answer to all of my prayers and now it seems that the database may not be supported by them after all. Glad to see, reading through these posts here that a database is being compiled here to replace the makers one. Let me ask a question, did anyone ever sort out the specs issue in relation to the DS and the way that calculates your average speed between sets?

I agree once the draw of free updates has gone, I would happy to pay the £19 a year asking price for an accurate database it is still less then I have been paying for my Snooper.

And I also saw a couple of posts here about someone trying to replace those awful voice prompts, did they ever succed in this quest? I have been trying without success to get any freshly made recordings to actually work with the unit.

I can get them to upload without any problems so the must be in correct format but the units is mute with them loaded, replace the original wav's and the unit sprngs back to life again. Checking the format stats everything seems to be 100% correct but they will not work in the DS.

Anybody got any ideas on this please?

[MaFt]

[regdor]

Hi . Well the awful voice is a feature of the DS unit, i got mine 2 years ago. The DS company had a very active forum and much discussion took place around the voice but i tried some downloads that were no better. It was not even clear if the voice was male or female, many thought it was a woman but i think it was one of their tech guys as i once spoke to him on the phone. There were some techie discussions about wavs and sample rate that were beyond me, suffice to say nobody got the voice any better as far as i know. Not sure why this was a problem for DS as TomTom et al do ok. But then Ds were a very strange company, they were VERY techie but did not have a clue about customer service!

What i did was clear the unit and download the original DS wavs but leave some fields blank, for example the startup message. i also blank the mobile message. This way i only get the important stuff such as "speed limit 70 miles an hour"

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[specmaster]

Hi regdor,

Well thats in intereasting angle, it would reduce the amount that I have to put with the horibble voice.

Perhaps I'll give it a go if I cannot get it resolved. I will try and record something myself rather than hack about something that someone else has done in a diffeant sample rate. I did however convert them to the spec as instructed in the manual but all I got was silence sp perhas the conversion wasn't 100% succesful.

Wish they had a mute button on the unit like the Snoopers do.

[specmaster]

I have now been able to get some of the voice files replaced with some that were for a Tom Tom, (downloaded from this forum) and modified, edited etc and saved in a format suitable for the Drivesmart unit. These have been uploaded and work OK.

Problem is that not all the relevant words / phrases are covered such as "Truvelo", "Speed to fast" or even "overspeed" etc. Does anyone know where I could find more sample files that could be downloaded and adapted?

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