How to cast character voices in Memorlined.

Open a scene with two characters in it and you have a casting problem before you have a memorization problem. Somebody has to be the other person. Memorlined treats that the way a production would: every character in your sides gets its own reader, a distinct voice you choose for the role, and the scene plays opposite you with each part sounding like itself. Not one narrator walking through the whole script in a single register. A cast.

If you searched for an app where each character speaks in a different voice, that is the whole idea, and the broader picture of what a reader in your pocket does is in an app that reads lines with you. This page is the how-to.

Where casting happens

Bring your sides in first, by paste, PDF, camera scan, or the curated library of original scenes; the walkthrough is in how to import your sides. Memorlined detects the characters, and then the casting screen greets you with a heading that tells you how to hold the whole thing: Cast Your Scene Partners.

The working rule sits right under it: "Tap to audition, double-tap to cast."

1. Audition before you commit. Tap a voice and listen. You are not sampling a sound effect, you are hearing a read, so listen the way you would listen to an actor across the table.
2. Cast on the double-tap. When one sits right against the role, double-tap and the part is theirs.
3. Repeat for every role. Voices are cast per character, per project. The scene you are working this week and the scene you tape next month can have entirely different casts.

What you are choosing between

There are 60+ readers on the roster. Each one carries a name, an age range, an energy, an accent, and a casting note, which is roughly the information you would want off a casting sheet. Read the notes before you start tapping; they narrow 60 voices down to a shortlist fast. The screen also surfaces Recommended Voices for each role, which is a fine place to start and a bad place to stop.

How to actually choose

Cast for the scene, not for polish. The trap is auditioning for the voice you like best in isolation, the smooth one, the pleasant one. That is not the job. The job is the role: does the age sit believably against the character, and does the energy give you something to push on or pull against. An interrogation rehearsed against a gentle, unhurried read is quietly a different scene, and it is the one you will have learned.

This is the same judgment you use when a human being sits across from you, and that judgment has its own page: choosing a reader for your self-tape. Everything there about age, energy, and what a reader owes you applies at the casting screen without translation.

What about the small roles?

The casting screen keeps Minor Characters in their own section, which is the correct amount of ceremony. The waiter with two lines needs a voice distinct enough that you never wonder who is speaking; he does not need callbacks. Pick something plausible in age and energy, cast it, and save your audition attention for the character whose cues you will be answering all week.

When a voice is not playing

You usually find out in the run, not at the audition. A read that sounded right in a ten-second listen can sit wrong once you are inside the scene: the pickup feels off, the energy fights you, the age stops being believable around page 3.

Your cast lives in the Green Room. Open it, find the character, and you have two moves: Recast, or Browse Readers to audition off the full roster again. Recasting is normal rehearsal-room business, not an admission that you chose badly. Productions recast. So do you. The moment you notice you are acting around the reader instead of with it, that is the note; go recast.

One practical note

Generating a reader's lines needs an internet connection. Once the lines are generated, the audio is stored on your phone, so the cast plays offline from then on. Cast at home on Wi-Fi, run the scene on the train, in the hallway outside the audition, wherever the work finds you.

Once the cast is set, the real work starts: pick the way of running the scene that matches where you are with the lines, laid out in the rehearsal modes guide.