Thread: talking Bucky skull

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I received my talking skull kit on friday and assembled it yesterday. I put a bunch of time into programming the audio, (pirates of the carribbean) using the technique posted by Cessers on the cowlacious website, in which you use a 12-15khz tone to mirror the audio that you want the servo to open with. only thing is that I want to put it on an ipod to stuff in the skull, but it doesnt properly relay the 12-15khz tone. so it works when it is plugged into the computer, but not when plugged into the ipod. does anybody have any ideas? what audio source do you use with your talking skull, CD player, ipod PC etc? what format do you record your audio in. mp3 doesn't seem to work for me. help please!

I'm not familiar with his technique and didn't see it on the site. Is he using Audacity to split the tracks and then have the tone on one track and the audio on the other?

What Halstaff said. You have to split the tracks so that the tone goes to the servo board and the voice track goes to the speakers. You can use programs like Audacity or GoldWave to edit the audio track. You need to get the LameWin (aka RazorLame) add-in for Goldwave to save .mp3 files; I don't know Audacity already has this. When you try to save a .mp3 file in GoldWave it will look for the add-in. If it doesn't find it, it will ask you if you want GoldWave to download and install it for you.

right, i am using audacity. i did slpit the tracks and assign one to left and the other to right. however the scary terry board can be directed to listen in on either or both, they are both passed through to the speakers. and when I export it as an mp3 track it doesnt move the servo. I don't know if it is a limitaion of the ipod or the mp3 format. when I save it as a wav. it works but not when I put it on the ipod. I did have to install the lame plug-in too. what do you use to relay the audio?

Check out this thread as it sounds similar to your problem. Some of the boards have a misplaced wire and this thread describes the fix.
Scary Terry Audacity Synchronisation

Same thing here, I did the mod on my st-400, split my tracks so that voice is on the L and sine wave is on the R, and both are set as mono. I am using audacity with lame and saved my file in mp3 format. I am using Carl's recorder/playback board as well. Audacity tells you that the file will be merged into mono, and the car/p board chip only records in mono. I've tried every way I can think of to record the tracks, I've used mono cables instead of the stereo cables that I bought with everything, and the servo just goes crazy when I play it. I just don't understand, when I hook bucky straight to my laptop and audacity, it works perfect. I do have a small bit of echo in the voice track, which may be part of the problem, but I cannot for the life of me get the voice to play on both speakers, and the echo doesn't seem to affect anything when hooked directly to audacity. I also had to record the voice at 44100 Hz so I could get the sine wave track to record at 22050...this was the only way I could get rid of the "tone" sound in the speakers, and I also had to amplify the sound in audacity to drive the servo board. I am open to any suggestions as the last two weeks of "playing" with it have resulted in nothing but frustration on my part.

Are you uploading a MP3 file into the recorder/playback board? Those ISD chips will accept a MP3 file, which is kinda weird given the type of device, but really work best with .wav files. If you have a stereo file, voice on one track and beep on the other, and it merges into mono you'll have everything on the single mono track. The bottom line is that you can't do the beep track thing in mono. If you have both the beep and the voice going to ST-400, I'm not surprised that that servo is acting strangely. You'll have to lose the beep track and save the voice only as a mono file.
That said, here's how to get the sound to both speakers. Use a mono-to-two mono splitter or cable coming out of the player board. Using a mono cable, plug one side to the ST-400 input and plug a mono-to-stereo adapter into the other jack on the splitter/cable. This will split the mono input signal into two identical mono outputs. Plug your speakers into the adapter and you're golden.

Makes total sense to me, off to ratshack to get the extra cord. BTW, audacity will let me do all of the converting I need, correct? Thank you for your help!!!

I just went through this as well, what I did in audacity was to download whatever track you are going to use, at the left of the beginning of the track there is the button right above the mute button. press that and select split stereo track. now you can edit each track individually. delete the left or right channel, then import your trigger tone and edit accordingly. when you are done go back and select merge stereo track and it will put it back together. just make sure that you have the jumpers on the board set to monitor the correct channel. this worked perfect for me. Also, when you seperate the stereo track you can adjust the volume for each track. I turned up the volume on the voice track and down on the trigger tone in an attempt to drown it out a bit.

unfortunately, I am running mine off of an Ipod and it just doesn't have the juice to run a 22khz tone at a level that will run the servo, so I had to use a 12khz tone. what I did though was to run a single Ihome rechargable speaker and placed it at the top of the board and "filtered" it through the batting, velvet and the hat it's self. this actually worked. I can hear the servo more than the trigger tone.

here is a pic of it.

Originally Posted by themichaelmyers

Makes total sense to me, off to ratshack to get the extra cord. BTW, audacity will let me do all of the converting I need, correct? Thank you for your help!!!

All you really need to do is to copy your voice track into an Audacity mono file for uploading to the Cow player board. The mono output from the Cow player board will be split into two, one for the servo driver board and one for the mono-to-stereo adapter that you plug your speakers into.