Couple of bugs, couple of suggestions

[Bradley Grafelman]

Justin (or Tim? or... anyone who holds the hammer used to whack vATIS when it needs it),

 

Noticed a couple of bugs/oddities just now while listening to the vATIS recording for KLAX. NW was controlling, so I don't have the raw .wav file or vATIS version number used to create it, but here[EDIT: removed] is an MP3 recording I made. Here's what I noticed:

 

METAR: KLAX 101853Z 26009KT 10SM MIFG FEW000 FEW065 SCT180 23/15 A2995 RMK AO2 SLP140 FG FEW000 T02280150

• 0:04 - Can hear an errant sound begin to build up during the pause before the time is given. This happens during almost all pauses between sentences. It almost sounds as if the last syllable of the previous word is being looped indefinitely, ramping up from silence to some level, right up until the sound buffer is suddenly cleared and filled with the next syllable after the pause. Skip to 1:28 to hear a longer example of this (after the end of the ATIS and before it repeats).
  
• 0:11 - Just "fog" --> missing the "shallow" (MI) descriptor that precedes it.
  
• 0:13 - "few clouds at zero" --> the R/W ATIS describes this as "sky partially obscured".
  
• 0:54 - "south" rather than "sierra" --> guessing vATIS isn't meant to support replacing lone letters with ICAO phonetic alphabet pronunciations and that the template just needs to be updated to spell out "south" rather than "S" ?
  
• 0:56 - "taxi on A" --> same as above, guessing we should spell out "alpha" rather than just "A" in the template?
  
• 1:33 - ATIS loops (left for reference due to the sound bug mentioned in #1 above)

Edited October 11, 2017 at 10:31 AM by Guest

[Justin Shannon]

0:04 - Can hear an errant sound begin to build up during the pause before the time is given. This happens during almost all pauses between sentences. It almost sounds as if the last syllable of the previous word is being looped indefinitely, ramping up from silence to some level, right up until the sound buffer is suddenly cleared and filled with the next syllable after the pause. Skip to 1:28 to hear a longer example of this (after the end of the ATIS and before it repeats).

This should accurately describe the issue at hand: VVL

 

0:11 - Just "fog" --> missing the "shallow" (MI) descriptor that precedes it.

This will be fixed in the next release.

 

0:13 - "few clouds at zero" --> the R/W ATIS describes this as "sky partially obscured".

This will be fixed in the next release.

 

0:54 - "south" rather than "sierra" --> guessing vATIS isn't meant to support replacing lone letters with ICAO phonetic alphabet pronunciations and that the template just needs to be updated to spell out "south" rather than "S" ?

This is because "S" is defaulted to be pronounced as "south" by the voice synthesizer. To override this, "S" needs to A) be prefixed with an asterisk (*S) to obey ICAO phonetic alphabet rules, B) written in plain text as "sierra" or C) added to the contraction list to override the default pronunciation.

 

0:56 - "taxi on A" --> same as above, guessing we should spell out "alpha" rather than just "A" in the template?

Ditto to what I said above.