Dennis McCarthy wrote:
On a related thread, does anyone know a user friendly way to make mp3s (or other format) with digitized voices out of P.G. e-books?
Specifically looking for using typical software on Windows or Mac format machines.
I have been able to get newer versions of Abode Acroread to "Read Out Loud" (an option under "View"). This has a couple problems, though: 1) Most people do not have access to Acrobat to make PDF files. Acroread is free and lets you read PDF files, but you need Acrobat (somewhat expensive) to make PDFs.
PDF creator is free, for Windows: http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator Don't know how good it is, but if you're starting with PG plain text files, it shouldn't have too much problem. Or go the whole hog and use Open Office: free, and its word processor has an option to export to PDF That solves the first part under Windows. Getting Real to save the output as audio or MP3, I don't know. The only version of Real I've had much experience with (for Linux) just doesn't have any provision to allow saving output. It sounds as if Windows is the same. However, under Linux, the "mplayer" program can use the Real codec for playing Real audio, and will happily give a variety of outputs, including dumping raw sound output to disk for burning or re-encoding, but I have no idea if there's a free equivalent for Windows. You might have to resort to feeding one PC's soundcard line out to another PC's line in. These are synthesised voices we're talking about, so the loss in quality won't matter, if you're encoding to MP3 anyway.