I’ve been using the FBW A32NX development version along with Pilot2ATC for some months now and would like to think I am having reasonable success with it.
Last week I decided to try and take it a stage further and try to adhere better to SOP’s. I thought FS2Crew A32NX edition might well help me achieve this.
I like FS2Crew but to be honest I’m finding it all very overwhelming at present. I know I haven’t been using FS2Crew for very long but I seem to be getting into quite some messes at times e.g getting IFR clearance for instance.
Has anyone else tried this combination that might be able to give me a couple of pointers or maybe recommend a youtube video or two. I have tried searching myself but can’t find anything very relevant.
Any help would be very much appreciated.
I use fs2crew with auto respond mode. Never fails. And the copilot is actually helping me to take some of the workload off.
I don’t use Pilot2ATC though. Just the default ATC with ATC assist turned on.
I work with this combination. My goal is to do everything in VR if possible, and speech recognition is essential for that.
In MSFS 2020, ATC must be turned off in the Assistance menu. In Pilot2ATC I have set the co-pilot to do the responses and frequency changes.
In FS2Crew, the option for ATC transmissions must be deactivated accordingly, because Pilot2ATC is solely responsible for this.
In FS2Crew I was also overwhelmed at the beginning, because you first have to learn the flows of pilot and co-pilot. Then the order of the mostly short checklists and finally the possible answers in the checklists.
In the learning phase, I didn’t use VR and had the in-app panel of FS2Crew displayed to learn how the flows and answer options are. After quite a few flights, I then made the switch to VR.
In addition, I use PushbackExpress and Self-Loading Cargo for maximum “realism” and immersion.
If necessary, I can contribute more information. Either here in the forum or via private message.
Heiko, very much appreciate your response. At least I now know that the what I’m trying to do is achievable.
I think that one of my main problems is not having enough experience yet with FS2Crew and I need to get a few more hours in. It’s good to know that you’re making this happen in VR as well, as I’m struggling with 2D which obviously should be much much easier.
I’ll persevere with it now and as I was also considering PushbackExpress I’ll get that too.
Thanks for you offer of help it’s much appreciated and I’ll post again if I start hitting brick walls over anything specific.
You’re welcome. You mentioned difficulties with the IFR clearance. I would be glad helping you out. What is the problem you’re struggling with? In my setting it is no problem so may be I can help.
My biggest problem with FS2Crew was the voice recognition… It keeps receiving the wrong commands from what I say. It’s frustrating for me to keep saying “Below the Line” and the FS2Crew detected it as “aligned” and responded with “check”… Like dude, come on… that’s not what I said.
And since I always livestream my flights, it’s kind of embarrassing to keep repeating the same thing over and over while standing on the taxiway and the copilot keeps hearing the wrong thing over and over.
That’s why I changed it to use Auto-respond, I just press one button and the whole conversation cycle happens. Never went wrong.
But I’m not in VR, though.
Just did another flight. An improvement on previous attempts. Most of my problems are down to my own impatience and stupidity.
Still using button control for the time being as I think I’m going to have to play around quite a bit with this hard/soft mute feature to get it right.
Neo I know exactly what you mean with this voice recognition. I had the same problem with Pilot2ATC to start with. I’ve got three microphones and they all vary. I find I’m having the best success with the cheapest one.
True. I also started with the button control mode at first.
For Voice Mode: I think training the speech recognition in Windows is quite important. And I have the impression that recognition has gotten even better over time, simply from frequent use with MSFS. It’s rare now that my commands are not recognized.
Important: You have to avoid that FS2Crew listens when you talk to Pilot2ATC. This is how I solved it: In Pilot2ATC I set up a push-to-talk button: one of the red buttons on my yoke. Then in FS2Crew and PushBack-Express, I put the soft mute on the exact same button. So when I talk to ATC, FS2Crew doesn’t listen. Ah, I have to mention, that I use FS2Crew in Open-Mic-Mode.
To avoid interference with Pushback-Express (that also runs in Open-Mic-Mode) I start Pushback-Express later when all the cockpit preparation is done.
And I also use the tool ‘VoiceMeeter’. With this tool you can set, among other things, that the output of FS2Crew and Pilot2ATC is not accidentally used again as input.
Well I’ve made progress. I’m now working with voice control and I’m having reasonable success.
One annoying thing was having my FO have two different voices. Now I’ll agree that the voices in FS2Crew are very very good however they obviously didn’t match my Ivona voice in Pilot2ATC. I therefore had to reproduce all 452 ogg FS2Crew voices into the Ivona ones. Much better but that’s a personal opinion.
My only issue (I think at the moment) is I use open mic mode as you suggested which works very well except my FO keeps saying “checked” erroneously. I take it this is because FS2Crew is picking up Pilot2ATC voices. You mentioned “VoiceMeeter” which I’ve taken a look at but I can’t see how to best set it up. The manual looks quite good but it seems to do a lot of what I don’t need.
If you could help an old guy out who has ageing brain cells it would be very much appreciated. Is there a YT video or a guide you could point me to.
Any help would as I say be appreciated.
Thanks
Good to hear about your progress. Very nice.
The co-pilot voice I use in Pilot2ATC (CereVoice Katherine (English - East Coast America)) and the one from FS2Crew (US female) are quite similar for me. But you are right - this is a problem 
And yes, even with VoiceMeeter which might not be as helpful as I thought, I also get these ‘checked’ and ‘Are you sure about that’ calls from the FO especially after reaching the cruise flightlevel. Everytime I grab my VR headset she ‘answers’ something 
Unfortunately I don’t have a solution for that.
Heiko thanks.
I have the Thrustmaster airbus joystick and have the trigger button programmed as PTT for PilotATC. I think I’ll try taking FS2Crew out of open mic and program another joystick button to talk to FO FS2Crew. As I use boring old 2D this shouldn’t pose any problems and might stop the phantom “checked” calls which seem to happen as you say when you reach cruise altitude.
May I ask how did you convert the voices ?
Can you give a short guide ?
I used this website: https://voicemaker.in/
You can try it out for free they have a vast amount of voices. I think you can convert about 250 characters gratis after that it costs $5 I think I paid which is unlimited for a month.
I then listened to all the voice recordings in the fs2crew folder I think it’s something like fs2crew\bin\voices\ fo\ look for the voice you want to convert. They are all *.ogg
play each file then type the text into the converter and save the recording as an ogg.
You then overwrite all the recordings in your fs2crew folder you want to replace with the new ones.
I should back up your folders just in case something goes amiss.
You will have to repeat the overwrite each time fs2crew is updated so be sure to keep a copy of your recorded voices.
It’s very time consuming but you are able to “tweak” them to personal preference.
Contact me again if you need anything further or something doesn’t work as I’m writing this from memory and I did it a couple months ago.
Amazon Polly has a great text to speech functionality with many different accents. And it’s free based on usage per year.
I use it extensively for MSFS VoiceAttack speech programming.
Check this out,
Yes I set up the Polly voices initially and like you say they are good. When they work. I found that it could take as many as ten attempts at restarting p2atc before they’d start responding. In the end I purchased a couple of ivona and cereproc voices which work 100%.
I looked around for a suitable program (preferably for free) which could convert text to speech as this is what is needed to record the .ogg files required for fs2crew. I didn’t find one (that’s not to say there isn’t one).
In the end I resorted to the voicemaker site as it was the most cost effective option for what I wanted.