Audio Lab & voices

Dubbing is entirely optional. A text-only translation is already a complete, publishable thing, and most adaptations start (and many happily stay) that way. But hearing characters speak your language is a different level of immersion, and Audio Lab is the room where that happens: every voice clip in the game, lined up with its original audio and your translated script, waiting for a voice.

How dubbing works#

The unit of work is the line: one spoken sentence or bark. Tranzio finds the voice clips inside the game's packed files, attaches each one to the script line it speaks, and lists them. You pick a line, record it, keep the take you like, and move on. Line by line, character by character, a dub grows.

1. 1
   Scan audio

   Sweeps the game's packed files for voice clips and indexes every one it finds. Run it once per game; re-run it after the game updates.

2. 2
   Link texts

   Attaches each clip to the script line it speaks, so you can read the words while you record. Most clips link automatically; the rest you point at by hand.

3. 3
   The labels rail

   Your characters, down the left. Labels are shared with the Translate page, so tagging a line as Mira in either place groups her voice clips here, with her own dubbing progress.

4. 4
   The audio editor

   Opening a line hands it to the multi-track editor: record as many takes as you like, trim them, shape the voice, and keep the best one.

What the badges mean#

Every row wears one badge, and it's the fastest way to read a game's audio at a glance. Sorting by status turns the list into a to-do queue: unlinked clips first if you're still matching, undubbed ones first if you're recording.

Working with the waveform#

Matching lines to game audio#

Behind every line is an audio file inside the game. Link texts matches them up for you, but a game that names its clips by number rather than by line leaves some to judgment, and that's where the file picker comes in:

Some clips aren't one line at all. A cutscene is often shipped as a single stem that speaks half a scene, and Tranzio marks those as a passage with the number of subtitles they carry, so a long clip never looks like a mislinked line.

Where the game keeps its audio#

Three arrangements, and you should not have to care which one your game uses. Many games keep each sound as its own file inside a pak, put there by audio middleware. Others use Unreal's own audio, where every sound lives inside an asset along with its sample rate and length. Tranzio lists both kinds together, plays both, and replaces both.

The third is a sound bank: one file holding hundreds or thousands of clips, each addressed by a number. Games built on FMOD work this way, and a single game can ship well over ten thousand clips in a couple of hundred banks. Tranzio opens the banks for you, so what you see on the Audio page is the clips, listed by the names the bank gives them, with the voice language read from the bank's own file name.

The difference only shows up at build time, and only in what gets written. A standalone sound file is replaced with your take. A sound inside an asset can't be: the asset is rebuilt around your take instead, with its length and channel count corrected to match what you actually recorded. Either way the original files in your game folder are never touched, and your take is encoded into the format that game expects before it goes in.

Recording a take#

Opening a line hands it to the audio editor. Record, listen back, record again: takes stack up and cost nothing, so there's no reason to settle for the first one. When you have one you like, trim the silence off both ends and keep it.

Bookmarks, for coming back to a clip#

A take you want to redo, a line whose delivery you are unsure about, a clip you need to check against the scene: bookmark it from the player at the bottom of the page and it joins the Marks tab beside the labels. Clicking it there loads the clip again.

Like the ones on the Text page, these are private to this computer. They are never uploaded and never shared with the rest of the adaptation.

Partial dubs are normal#

Dubbing every line of a big game is a massive job, often thousands of lines. Coverage is counted per character, so you can see exactly where the effort went and where it still has to go.

Voice coverage shows up on your game page automatically, so players always know what to expect before installing. And if what you want to dub is a video (a trailer, a cutscene, a walkthrough) rather than in-game lines, that's a different room: Studio is built exactly for that.