Somebody thought that it was all cool and dandy to use voice actors to deliver some lines, and for an english speaker it might be the case, but for my players, who don’t understand english very well, it’s just rubish.
Be more considerate to all the non-english speakers, which pay the same coin as everybody else, and add assests that are usable for us too.
Thank you very much
The voices in our soundsets are purely optional for those wanting to use them, many of the sets feature no voice at all for that very reason.
We have already produced several soundsets, which have been voiced/sang in German (@new_vision, one of our content creators is German) and we would love to do more, but as a mainly English speaking company we can only use the language talent that we have access to and producing soundsets translated into all of the different languages spoken by our community would be a huge task.
With the Creator you can copy any of our sets and replace the voice acting with your own, One of the reasons we created it. We would be more than happy to publish those soundsets as Community Content for everyone to share
Thanks for your quick response, but i digress. By your reasoning all content is optional. What I’m trying to say is that your are spending resources on content that is not usable by everyone. You ekked the price of an already expensive subscription (20$ to 22$), so It fumes me to see content I’ve helped to pay for that I cannot use.
Regards
Our voice acting is done either in house or by the creators of the games themselves, such as the DnD staff who voiced the characters for the DnD soundsets. It would be totally unfair to remove the voices, which many of our English users greatly enjoy. Instead we are looking at ways to localise the app to be more usable by everyone.
One of the many benefits of Syrinscape is that all elements are optional if you don’t want a spoken line to appear in the ambience you can turn of the element and save it as a new mode. You can totally customise the soundsets to sound however you like.
With regards to the price increase, Syrinscape is billed monthly so that increase that we ekked out was $1 a month and the first increase in over 5 years. During that time a subscription has gone from offering around 50 soundsets to well over 400. That’s, in addition, to access to the Syrinscape Soundset Creator and Syrinscape Online, both of which were expensive programs to develop but allow users of Syrinscape far more flexibility with there gaming. You also gain permanent ownership of any soundsets that we release during your subscription.
You could always narrate your self instead of using the voices, or narrate a summary after you play the lines in your language to help those players that don’t understand. Since i play in Fantasy Grounds i simply drag the text to the chatbox so that people can read it if they have trouble understanding it.
However, asking a company that is mainly English to create content for every language out there, or to try and record in many accents the lines is a bit out there, don’t you think?
I pay the same as you but im not interested in the sci fi sounds. Should i ask the company to stop wasting time with that and not produce that content because im not interested in it? Same as the soundsets in german when i have no use with that because i only speak spanish and english?
However, asking a company that is mainly English to create content for every language out there, or to try and record in many accents the lines is a bit out there, don’t you think?
Welcome, diagonal-reader white knight. If not the post, at least read the title of the thread properly.
I’ll TLDR for you. “Make the content language-neutral”, so less dialog, more of everything else.
As I have already said and the post from from Garr_71 reiterates although you do not use the voices, a great many of our subscribers do. We can’t stop making content just because some people don’t need it, or are unable to fully use it. Just the same as we wouldnt stop making sci-fi content just because some people don’t need sci-fi sounds.
We design our content to meet the needs of all of our users, from all over the world and have designed an app that then lets you customise that content to better suit your own needs. As has already been said you can cut out the voices, replace them with your own recordings if you would prefer, the app is designed to be as flexible as possible. But what you are asking us to do is reduce the functionality of the app and it’s content rather than enhance it.
Understood. I made a suggestion on a suggestion forum, and was discarded.
Sad to hear about that because it’s another useless thing that I have to bear with, and I hope It doesn’t get out of hand.
Thanks for your time
It wasn’t discarded, we listened to what you said just as we do all suggestions. In this situation we explained that the suggestion would not be practical or fair to our others users and explained different ways that you could alter the sets to meet your own needs. I certainly wouldn’t call that being dismissive
Hey @axor,
Don’t worry, we are definitely hearing you. I (as CEO) read pretty much every comment on these forums, though I don’t always respond.
Your suggestion has gone in my head, and is noted, and will factor into decisions we make in the future. Steve and I have been discussing your thoughts too.
Most of all, THANKS soooo much for your support as a subscriber. I’m sorry there is some content that is not of best use for you, but I hope that there’s still lots in there to keep the atmosphere going in your games. 
Thanks for listening me, even if the final decision is against language neutrality.
Hi everybody.
While expanding a bit on the subject, to my own understanding language neutrality advises not to put language specific lines in a sound effect or music. Ever. Though greenskins’ (and monsters’ alike) words are gorgeous, such as in the goblin combat tune 
Having them as separate effects is fine, though. When I master for my kids and friends I might use those to teach a bit of english, when I narrate for my friends I’ll skip them as english is not so broadly understood in my country. But I like to have a choice.
To OP, it seems to me that voice acting has been done mainly for the late involvement with Wizards of the Coast, just to add some shine to the gold. Though I’m a relatively new subscriber, it does seem that acting is such a minority in the syrinscape database that to a fast glance it could well be defined as a bonus track, not a featured album.
Personally, I prefer to act myself: I want to be the one giving voice to Xanathar, not some very talented professional my-fun-spoiling voice actor that would do a much better job than myself 