Latest News

There's a new Mr. Voice user to welcome to the fold: ComedySportz-New Orleans. A big hello to Fritz and the gang!

Mr. Voice 2.2.1 is now available - it fixes a bug that would cause WinAmp to get highlighted, instead of the Mr. Voice window, when playing or stopping songs. Thanks to Lanny in Dallas for catching it.

This bug shouldn't be an issue on the other platforms, so I haven't made binary releases for them.

Mr. Voice 2.2 has been released! This is a moderate upgrade release, with the main focus being on integration with this new website. There is a slight database schema change handled the first time you run the program, but run a database backup on your old version before installing this one just to be on the safe side. All users are encouraged to upgrade to this release, as support for Mr. Voice Online in older versions will probably go away with the next release (2.3).

Releases are available for Windows 2000+, Fedora Core 4+, and MacOS X 10.4. Support for Fedora Core 3 and MacOS X 10.3 have been dropped (though the source release should work on those).

Changes include:

*) A new option under the Online Preferences to edit the XML-RPC (Mr. Voice Online) URL that is used (in case I need to change it again). It was hardcoded into the program before.

*) Fixed bugs that were causing strange quote marks to appear in song and category names.

*) Display the song filename in the "Edit Song" menu. Suggested by Bill in Portland.

*) Display the time of a song next to the hotkey listing. Suggested by Ted in Chapel Hill.

*) Added an option under the File menu to export the song list from your Mr. Voice database as either a text file or Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. Suggested by Ted in Chapel Hill.

In the six months or so that the website was on the back burner, several new improv groups joined the fun train that is Mr. Voice. I'd like to send the belated shoutouts to them now.

ComedySportz-Houston, doubling my presence in Texas.

DSI Comedy Theater in the Chapel Hill/Carrboro area of NC.

The Comedy Cafe in Raleigh, started by Jeremy Wrenn and David "Bling Bling" Dollar.

How We First Met, out of San Francisco. This is really cool, because they're the first non-ComedySportz-esque group to use the software.

Bishop's School Improv in La Jolla (San Diego area).

ComedySportz-San Jose, who are apparently using Mr. Voice in a supporting role with other sound software.

Thanks, everybody! Spread the word!

After being broken in terms of browser support and functionality for a while, I'm pleased to announce a relaunche of the mrvoice.net website and Mr. Voice Online service!

For the geeks in the house, the new mrvoice.net is written in Ruby On Rails, which was cool. For the nongeeks, it means several things:

1) The website should no longer be broken in Internet Explorer. Well, not as broken. There are a couple of visual effects that don't play well with IE, so they'll show up differently in that browser. It shouldn't be "broken" per se, but you'd still be better off using Firefox.

2) The part of Mr. Voice Online that works within the Mr. Voice application should work the same. I've rewritten the interface to the Mr. Voice Online database on this side, and the upcoming 2.2 release will use that, but I've left a copy of the old interface up for the time being. That means that if you're on 2.1.2 or lower, this new site shouldn't break any Mr. Voice Online stuff. If it does, let me know.

3) The download functionality of Mr. Voice Online works again. There's a catch, though - you have to be logged in. You'll see a login link at the top - click it, and it'll ask you for your Mr. Voice Online key. You can get it out of your email or your Mr. Voice preferences. Or, if you still can't find it, click the Lost Key link at the top and you can pick yourself out of the list of users. Find yourself, hit send, and your key will get sent to the email address I have on file for you.

After logging in, if you go to the Mr. Voice Online section, you will once again be able to download individual songs or bundles. If you are logged in, you can click on a song title and download the file directly, or add songs to your shopping cart and then download them all in a bundle, suitable for importing into Mr. Voice via the Songs menu.

4) Plenty of RSS feeds. In the sidebar on the left, at the bottom, you'll find RSS and Atom feeds to keep up with Mr. Voice news postings, new songs added to Mr. Voice Online, and software development. More may be in the works, so stay tuned. If you're not already hip to the RSS jive, find out more about RSS at Wikipedia.

As with any new venture, there may be some loose ends left over, so email Wade if you find anything broken. Also, if there are things that would make the site easier to use, let me know. This new framework will make adding functionality much easier, so send me your ideas!