EditVoicepack: an all-time bestseller that contains no voices at all

A simMarket customer called DEMASTER left a review on 22 June 2025 that is, unintentionally, the most useful sentence written about this product in a decade: "for years have to say its literally all i use - ive been getting by on the eval mode until now i finally broke down and bought it". He had been running EditVoicepack unlicensed, with a voice periodically announcing that he was running it unlicensed, and he kept doing it for years because the tool was worth the nagging. Then he paid €12.50 anyway.

That is a strange thing for a product sitting at number 29 on simMarket's all-time bestseller list to admit on its own store page. It is also the honest shape of the thing. EditVoicepack is the twenty-three-year-old utility that fixes the single most irritating flaw in FSX and Prepar3D's built-in ATC — the controller who calls your Lufthansa A320 "Airbus three-two-zero" and pronounces Schaumburg as "zero six charlie" — and it does that job better than anything else that runs on those simulators.

It also contains no voices. Not one. The name says voicepack and the store category says sounds, but nothing you buy here is a recording. EditVoicepack is a splicing tool: it opens the ten speech recordings Microsoft shipped with FSX in 2006, finds the syllables you need scattered across other words, and stitches them into new ones. Want ATC to say "Caravelle"? You will be hunting the "vel" out of an existing phrase and dragging the segment boundary until the join stops sounding like a ransom note. There is a tutorial about exactly that on the developer's site, and it is longer than you would like.

And it stops dead at Prepar3D. Bevenel's Lars answered the MSFS question publicly on 14 December 2020 and has not had to revise it since: MSFS generates its ATC through Windows or Azure text-to-speech, and "so far I have not seen a way to hook into this in order to change anything." A tool that edits recorded speech has nothing to edit when the speech is synthesised on demand. So the all-time bestseller is, in 2026, a legacy-simulator product — and the good news buried in that is that the legacy simulator it serves, Prepar3D, is still being sold and still being flown.

This review reads 26 sources: three simMarket pages including the full seventeen-review rating breakdown, eleven pages of Bevenel's own site covering the complete release notes back to November 2014 and the public question board, four forum threads on AVSIM and FSDeveloper spanning 2016 to 2021, the CalClassic and official MSFS forums, the AVSIM and Flyaway freeware libraries, and the thin video record. Reddit is blocked in this environment, so the sentiment-at-a-glance check that would normally sit alongside the forum threads is missing — for a niche legacy utility with an active developer Q&A board, that matters less than usual.

What you are actually buying

One product, one price, one shop. Bevenel does not run a store of its own; the developer's site sells nothing and points at simMarket for the licence key.

Product	EditVoicepack XL 6.4.2
Developer	Bevenel (Netherlands, KvK 73947261)
Price	€ 12.50 at simMarket, PID 8767
Download size	4.73 MB
First payware release	5.0.69, 10 November 2014
Latest release	6.4.2, 18 July 2024
Simulators	FSX (DVD and Steam), Prepar3D v1, v2, v3, v4, v5 and v6
Also	FS2004, explicitly flagged experimental, and only alongside a supported sim
Not supported	MSFS 2020, MSFS 2024, X-Plane
Trial	Fully featured, watermarked by a spoken message in some transmissions

Two things about that price. simMarket's terms, clause 1.5, say "All prices stated on SIMMARKET include the respectively applicable value added tax" — so the €12.50 shown to a browser with no resolved session is the zero-VAT figure, and an EU buyer logged in with a billing country will be quoted more. There is nothing to compare it against, because there is no second shop. Anyone telling you EditVoicepack is cheaper somewhere is telling you about a pirate copy.

The other thing is that a version of this software has been free since 2003 and still is. The AVSIM library carries EditVoicepack releases dated 13 February 2003, 17 August 2003 and 17 October 2004; Flyaway Simulation hosts EditVoicepack 3.0 for FS2004 (17 June 2006) and EditVoicepack X 4.0 for FSX (17 June 2013) as freeware, from the author's earlier Bevelstone Production identity. They still work. An AVSIM thread from November 2021 has one member confirming exactly that — "The freeware version will also work, you'll just need to manually point it to the voicepack file" — and another member explaining in the same thread why he bought a licence anyway: he had been copying folders between an FSX-Steam install and Prepar3D to trick the free version into finding the right file, and "I ended up just buying a license to avoid the hassle when I updated from P3D v3 to P3D v4."

So what €12.50 buys, precisely: installation detection for every Prepar3D version through v6, more than four thousand ready-made airline callsigns instead of the free version's eight hundred, automatic download of modifications other users have shared, the missing-callsign scanner, the voice-speed processing, and someone to email when it breaks. It buys convenience and a data set. It does not buy audio.

What the community consistently praises

The callsign fix is the thing, and it has been the thing for ten years. Ken, on simMarket in March 2017: it corrects airline callsigns without "adjust[ing] them via the aircraft.cfg file (a process that rarely works anyway)". Jay, May 2018, had his virtual airline's own callsign in ATC chatter. Ernest, May 2017, on the smaller airports: instead of FSX spelling out 06C it now says "Schaumburg". Nine years apart, the same praise.

The missing-modification scanner is the feature power users single out and the marketing buries. It reads your aircraft.cfg files, works out which callsigns, manufacturers and models your sim will ask for and cannot say, and lists them. On AVSIM in August 2016, thetford569 called it "the coolest feature of EditVoicePackXL... It allows me to see what I am missing and make corrections, download the right ones, or make my own." If you fly with a large AI traffic install, this is the difference between guessing and knowing.

ICAO instead of FAA phraseology is the second most-cited reason people buy. Default FSX and Prepar3D ATC talks like it is working the Chicago sector regardless of where you are; the switch changes the phrase set. chris, January 2021, listed it alongside getting the winds with the takeoff clearance and controllers signing off as you change frequency. ELMAR, April 2020: "sorting out Callsigns and improving on the phraseology is great."

The speed slider deserves its own line. You can push the controllers and pilots to speak faster, which sounds like a gimmick and is not — it shortens every transmission, which means the sim's ATC gets through its traffic queue faster and there is more dead air for you to talk in at a busy field. chris again: "I stick with values between 20-25% faster which sounds more natural."

Sharing works. EditVoicepack pulls down community modifications on startup, and the wider ecosystem has been feeding it for years: Military AI Works and Alpha India Group ship callsign packs, Perfect Flight published EditVoicepack Callsigns Pack 10 in June 2018, and the AVSIM library still lists user mods dated as recently as 12 July 2022 (ITA Airways). A 2016 AVSIM member counted 38 community-added aircraft manufacturers and about 100 military model names in his copy.

Support, historically, was excellent. Peter (August 2018): "Lars supports the program very well and it's has been well thought out." ELMAR (April 2020): one problem in years, "sorted by devloper within 24 hours", and "The Update for V5 was really fast" — which the release notes bear out, Prepar3D v5 support landing in 6.3.0 on 15 April 2020, weeks after the sim shipped.

What keeps coming up as a problem

"My edits don't appear in the sim." Still open, and mostly not the tool's fault. This is the single most repeated complaint in the record. FSDeveloper, December 2016: a user creates callsigns in Prepar3D v3, "the ATC does not reconize any of the changes made"; the fix was that he also had to add the entry to airlines.cfg. FSDeveloper again, February 2018: Mameni builds an "aviancaperu" callsign for an A320 in P3D v4, the files save correctly, nothing happens in the sim; the thread closes unresolved after suggestions about matching aircraft.cfg and applying the change to all seven or eight voice sets. Bevenel's own board, 26 August 2023: "Incorrect ATC and Pilot Airline and Flight Number", no answer. The underlying cause is real and external — the simulator only asks for a callsign your voicepack contains if aircraft.cfg and airlines.cfg agree — but EditVoicepack does not check for the mismatch it is about to be blamed for, and seven years of threads say it should.

The advanced interface is work. Peter, on simMarket, was positive and still wrote that it "took me 10 minutes to figure out how the to build 'phrases', by combining parts of existing ones". A 2016 AVSIM member put it flatly: "You still have to piece together the call sign, aircraft name, etc. from existing audio snippets which are already included in EditVoicePack XL." Another described getting a full MAIW callsign set in as "time consuming... but worth it if you like realistic AI". Nobody says it is broken. Everybody says it is fiddly. Status: still open, and structural — there is no way to splice syllables that is not fiddly.

It does not change how the controllers sound. Ken flagged this in March 2017 — "it does not change the voice accents of the flight crews" — and it remains true nine years and two major versions later. The variation feature processes the ten original recordings so that two aircraft on frequency are less likely to be voiced identically. It does not add speakers, accents or new performances. Status: not a bug, but a persistent gap between what the name promises and what the product is.

MSFS support: closed, not open. Iflygary asked on 11 December 2020; Lars answered on 14 December 2020 that MSFS routes ATC through Windows or Azure text-to-speech and he had found no hook. Nothing has changed in the five and a half years since, and nothing in the release notes suggests it is being worked on. Status: settled. Treat it as a permanent property of the product, not a roadmap item.

Support has gone quiet. The last release was 6.4.2 on 18 July 2024. The last question Lars answered on his own board was 15 March 2024. A bug report titled "Didnt play audio in edit mode", posted 13 October 2025, has zero answers as of this writing — ten months of silence on a fault in the tool's own preview playback. The site is maintained enough to carry a 2026 copyright line. That is a developer who has not disappeared, but is not obviously still on duty either.

The buy page is stale. Bevenel's own Try & Buy page lists supported simulators up to "Lockheed Martin's Prepar3D v5". The release notes say Prepar3D v6 support shipped in version 6.4.1 on 9 August 2023, and the simMarket listing has said so for three years. A prospective v6 buyer reading the developer's site is being talked out of a purchase the developer can fulfil.

Performance and stability

There is no frame-rate story here, which is the point. EditVoicepack is a 4.73 MB desktop application that runs with the simulator closed, rewrites the .gvp voicepack file in the sim's Sound/ATC folder, keeps a .evpOrg backup of the original, and then gets out of the way. Nothing is injected, nothing hooks the sim at runtime, and the documented uninstall is to delete the modified .gvp files and rename the backups back. That is about as low-risk as a simulator add-on gets, and it explains why nobody in ten years of threads complains about it costing performance.

The application itself is less spotless. Bevenel's board carries "Program not responding" (28 May 2021) and "Program very slow and laggy" (26 June 2021), both answered; a licence-key problem in June 2022; installer errors in March 2023 and February 2024, answered; and the unanswered audio-preview failure from October 2025. The pattern is a small .NET application with a large tree view and a lot of sound files, occasionally struggling on big installs. It requires .NET Framework 4.8 and supports Windows 7 through 11, with the older-Windows disclaimer you would expect.

Worth knowing before you buy: the DVD release of FSX in Japanese is not supported, and on German, French and Spanish installs enabling the ICAO or FAA phrase sets mixes English text into your ATC display. Bevenel says this plainly on its own page, which is more than most developers manage.

Who should buy it

The Prepar3D flyer with a serious AI traffic install — buy it, today. If you have MyTraffic, AIG or MAIW packages installed and you are hearing generic callsigns or silence where an airline name should be, this is the tool that fixes it, the missing-modification scanner will tell you exactly what is broken, and €12.50 is not a decision. This is the profile the product was built for and it serves them well.

The FSX or FSX:Steam flyer who wants ICAO phraseology and correct airport names — buy it, but run the trial first. Everything works, but the trial is fully featured and only inserts a spoken watermark, so there is no reason not to spend an evening confirming the workflow suits you before paying. If splicing syllables out of a search box sounds like a chore rather than a hobby, you will have found that out for free.

The FS2004 loyalist — do not buy this one. Bevenel labels FS2004 support experimental, says fixing experimental faults is low priority, warns in as many words not to base a purchase on it, and requires you to own a supported simulator as well. Download the free EditVoicepack 3.1 from the AVSIM library instead. It is what CalClassic's own forum told a member to use in June 2021, and the FS2004 data files stopped changing in 2006 anyway.

The MSFS 2020 or 2024 pilot — this is not for you, and no future version will be. The developer has said so publicly and technically since December 2020. Adjust your callsign in aircraft.cfg or the pre-flight customisation panel, as the official MSFS forum thread from December 2021 works through, and spend the €12.50 on something that runs in your simulator.

The casual FSX user who never files with ATC — skip it. If you fly VFR out of small strips, or you use VATSIM and PilotEdge and never touch built-in ATC, this fixes a problem you do not have.

Where it stands today

The oldest file the AVSIM library holds under this name is dated 13 February 2003. That is a twenty-three-year run for one person's utility, eleven of those years as a paid product with a release history you can read line by line and a public question board with the developer's own replies on it. Very little in this hobby ages that well, and the all-time sales rank is earned rather than accidental: there is no evidence it was ever given away as a simMarket promotion, and every one of the seventeen store reviews is dated after it went payware in November 2014. The one thing that does complicate the rank is the free lineage — a decade of freeware built the reputation the payware inherited, and a fully featured evaluation mode has let people like DEMASTER use it for years without paying. That is a reason the name is well known. It is not a reason the paid sales are hollow.

The rating deserves a footnote, because simMarket rounds it down. The listing displays a flat 4 out of 5 across 17 reviews; the actual spread is twelve fives, three fours, one three and a single one-star, which averages 4.47. The headline understates the room.

What has changed is the ground underneath it. Version 6.4.2 was released on 18 July 2024 and there has been nothing since. Prepar3D v6 support arrived in August 2023 and the developer's own shop window has not been updated to mention it. A support question from October 2025 sits unanswered. None of that breaks a product this self-contained — a voicepack file you have already compiled keeps working forever, with no dependency on a launcher, a server or a subscription — but it does mean you are buying a finished thing rather than a living one, from a developer whose last public word on the future of ATC modding was that the future does not have a door in it.

Buy it if you fly FSX or Prepar3D and the ATC calling you the wrong thing has been bothering you for years. Do not buy it expecting new voices, and do not buy it expecting to bring it forward with you.