I have several tapes (yes actual cassette tapes) of my grandfather reading a novel.
Unfortunately a few of the tapes have degraded to the point that I cannot play them back.
I would love to recreate his voice, to “rerecord” the missing bits.
The recordings are in Danish.
Is this possible?
If it is, how can I go about it?
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While tools exist, like people already commented, remember that the result may not be what you expect.
A recreation whether by AI or a skilled voice actor will have slightly different intonations, emphasis, tempo variations, pauses and lack of pauses that are not your granfather’s. It is very likely to feel flat and wrong in an unpleasant way.
I can’t speak to the AI voice generation part of this, but you might be interested in the Domesday Duplicator for digitizing your audio, especially if some or it is slightly degraded.
https://github.com/harrypm/DomesdayDuplicator
The project was originally designed for laserdisc, but it’s been expanded to support VHS and cassette tape. Traditionally, you would play your tape on a cassette player, then the built in analog circuitry would convert the magnetic signals into audio, amplify them, and feed them to a sound card on your PC, which then converts the analog signal to a digital audio stream.
With the Domesdsy Duplicator, you record the raw magnetic signal from the read head and directly digitize it into a bitstream that you can then process as needed. For DIY archiving from an analog source, it’s one of the best options for signal fidelity, and it will give you the truest representation of what’s actually on the tape.
This project looks very cool, but at 300usd+ I think it is out my budget range for this project.
If you can get them into a digital format I’ve personally used eleven labs to clone voices and make narrations for missions I created for a video game. I tried using different open source projects and getting it to run on my own with no avail, but 11 labs has been solid (it is unfortunately paid software of like $5/10 bucks a month though)
Was this with the “Instant voice clone”?
Elvenlabs is currently the best but you can get some very good results with first xtts then rvc as a second pass. It involves fine tuning models and running things with python and notebooks, so requires some know how.
You can explore more models on the huggingface page https://huggingface.co/models?pipeline_tag=text-to-speech&sort=trending
Most have a huggingface space dedicated to them where you can try them, here is the xtts space for example https://huggingface.co/spaces/coqui/xtts
The language adds an other layer of difficulty, I would try their demo first to see if it gives anything workable but it isn’t a language current tts software cater too, it doesn’t seem to be an available option on xtts sadly.
Thank you for the tips. As I see it currently, I expect the language to be the biggest hurdle. It doesn’t appear like something I can add myself, even if I had the data for a model. So as far as I can tell it involves two currently more or less impossible steps: Get model data and teach language to model.
I’ve been able to generate very good results with this open source project. You need a pretty good nVidia GPU, and it takes some time and tedious work to get it working they way you want it to:
https://github.com/neonbjb/tortoise-tts
Some voices sound exactly right. Other sound like a broken robot. The main reason I like it is that I can run it local without having to sign up for some stupid cloud service.
Looks very cool. I was unable to see anything regarding languages. Is it completely language independent somehow, or is it English only?
Clone his vocal chords and get surgery to replace your old voice chords with the new cloned one.
