X-ATC-Chatter and FS-ATC-Chatter have clips that are curated from LiveATC.net. Stick and Rudder Studios has a licensing agreement with LiveATC.net that needs to be renewed every two years. That agreement has been renewed multiple times and we expect that will continue to be the case. In the highly unlikely event that the agreement is not renewed, we would have to stop offering FS-ATC-Chatter and X-ATC-Chatter and would not be able to offer any further clips updates. However, you would still be able to continue to use all the clips you purchased and any clip updates even if our agreement with LiveATC.net is terminated.
No. Chatter from LiveATC.net is collected by volunteers near airports that operate Air Band radio scanners. Not every airport has a volunteer and in some cases the feed from the scanner varies in quality. Clips are collected from feeds that have reasonable reception quality and then the clips are edited to remove some of the more glaring location specific references. References to taxi-ways, runways, SIDS, STARS, etc. are not removed. You can learn more about how we collect clips on the chatter project page: Chatter Project
Since X-ATC-Chatter 1.6.2 we have split the distribution of clips into three separate ZIP files due to the increasing number of clips being collected. In order to install the additional clips you need to follow the instructions in the User Guide. Watch the first tutorial to see how to install / merge the additional regions.
https://www.stickandrudderstudios.com/x-atc-chatter-tutorial-videos/
The only difference between these two products is the stand alone chatter player. The clip collection is the same in both products. X-ATC-Chatter has a player that works with X-Plane and FS-ATC-Chatter has a player that works with FSX, FSX Steam Edition, P3D V1-5, and MSFS 2020. Either product will work with Pilot2ATC.
If you plan on using the product on both X-Plane and any of the Microsoft based simulators you only need to buy either X-ATC-Chatter or FS-ATC-Chatter based on which simulator you use the most. You can then download the free demo of either one and copy the clips from the collection you purchased to the demo player of the other product.
Unfortunately no. Current U.K. law prohibits unauthorized recording of ATC transmissions. This fact has been documented in the LiveATC.net FAQ's. For this reason the Europe clip collection contains no chatter from the U.K.
Version 1.7 and above of X-ATC-Chatter has a menu item named Check for Updates. You can use this to see if any audio clips have been added or removed from the master collection and you can download them with this function. However, if you need to reinstall the entire product from scratch continue to read the remainder of this FAQ.
If you purchased X-ATC-Chatter from the X-Plane.org store you just need to log into your store account and go to the download page for the X-ATC-Chatter order.
If you purchased X-ATC-Chatter here on the Stick and Rudder Studios website you would have been mailed a Gumroad receipt to your email address. That receipt contains a "View Product" link that you can use to download the product again.
If you lost your receipt you should be able to retrieve it from your Gumroad library https://gumroad.com/library if you had created one. You can also obtain a duplicate receipt here: https://gumroad.com/charge
As a last resort Gumroad can resend your receipt. Simply contact Gumroad at Support@Gumroad.com. Please note that it may take a day to respond to your email depending on your time zone.
Although I have not personally tested them as I don't have Prepar3D or PRO-ATC-X it seems that some users have had success with using them. Check out this thread on the PRO-ATC-X forums.
http://www.pointsoftware.de/proatcxforum/forum/index.php/topic,2991.msg15074.html#msg15074
It may be necessary to convert the collection from .mp3 format to .wav format using any number of audio file conversion utilities.
No. At this time we are only collecting clips from pilots and controllers that are speaking English. You will hear the pilot or controller's native accent as clips are collected from many different countries. The main reason we don't accept other languages is that I only speak English so I'm unable to validate if the non-English clips were properly curated by the volunteer.
Simple ATC provides for a more immersive ATC communications experience by using the text to speech capabilities of the operating system to synthesize communication between your aircraft and ATC. This capability is built into X-Plane but the voices tend to be very robotic and it does not handle the various flight plans such as VFR and VFR with flight following.
Simple ATC is not intended to be a full blown ATC add-on. For that we would recommend either Pilot2ATC, 124th ATC, or flying on virtual networks like Pilot Edge, POSCON, and Vatsim.
Simple ATC is designed to work best with the Microsoft SAPI voices. It will work using the one X-Plane voice on OSX but it is not as immersive as having multiple SAPI voices on Windows.
The X-ATC-Chatter user guide has an extensive section on how to get more voices. It will tell you how to install a number of free Microsoft voices. You can also purchase SAPI-5 voices from Ivona and Cereproc:
https://nextup.com/ivona/index.html
https://www.cereproc.com/en/buy-voices
Amazon also has an Amazon Polly Windows Plugin that will install the Polly Text to Speech voices as SAPI voices. This is a subscription service based on the number of characters that are converted but there is a free tier available with limits. The Polly voices are very impressive and it may be worth it to give them a try as an alternative purchase option. There were one or two voices that seemed to generate errors but you can simply unselect them for use on the Simple ATC Voices tab if they don’t generate speech with the Try button.
Provisioning Amazon Polly is a multi-step process so read the instructions carefully. Also, make sure you are comfortable with how the free tier works and what you will be paying should you exceed the free tier limits.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/polly/latest/dg/sapi-plugin.html
X-ATC-Chatter was tested against 124th ATC v2.0. You can download 124th ATC here:
https://124thatc.matacchieri.eu/
X-ATC-Chatter 1.7.1 or older and FS-ATC-Chatter 1.2.2 and older relied on the FTP protocol and a different update server. These older versions of the products will not work with our new dedicated update server which uses only the HTTP protocol.
Update X-ATC-Chatter and/or FS-ATC-Chatter to the latest versions to make use of the new dedicated update server. Should you continue to have problems contact us.
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