TOPIC:

What would be involved in supporting audio formats other than MP3? MP3 files are very large. I really like AW's vox files - 100X compression of .Wav files. Would it be major surgery to substitute another type of audio player? (it would have to be one that doesn't need the user to tinker with control panel, etc.)

Further on audio - the text to speech concept has real potential, but not for me in the form it was in in XOT 1.7. There you do need to fiddle with control panel settings which is going to kill any commercial application. Also it read the header to the page, then stopped until some control keys were pressed. I know this is for it primary goal, accessibility. If TTS could use the new male/female voices developed by the TechDis people and if it could read exactly the text the author specifies (somehow) on the page - it would be extremely useful. If it could do other languages natively, it would be a godsend. For me it needs to automatically read the specified text when the user goes to the page.

Om the first subject. It also depends on the settings used for encoding the MP3. MP3's can be small as well if you change the 'standard' settings (44.1 kHz, 128 kbit/s, 2 channels) to 11 kHz, 32 kbit/s, 1 channel.

The issue is not that we can't support other file formats perse, but we need codecs to be installed on the client machine to be able to play the sounds. And MP3 is universally available at the moment.

Thanks Tom, I didn't realize I could set the MP3 specifications... that may be the best solution.
BTW I have about 1500 VOX files that need to be re-recorded... if anyone knows of any way to repurpose these files I'd be very interested in hearing about it. Their quality is not good as they are highly compressed wave files.

Could you send me a VOX file? I'll see what I can do. You probably will not be able to attach one on the forum. Please send it by PM.

Hello Tom

I forwarded three (zipped) VOX files by PM.

www.cereproc.com/en/home

Any thoughts on using a third party tool like cere voice inside XOT? Technically I don't know if this would be possible, but the best case for me is to find some method of realistic TTS that is cross platform and doesn't require any user intervention to fiddle with 'control panel' or whatever. If it could read English, French, Spanish, that would be perfect. Then, there would need to be a way to 'highlight' or somehow identify the text in XOT to be read. I've not read about using XOT for multi language delivery, perhaps I'm missing the boat on some other method or future plans.

Thanks
Ronm2

www.fromtexttospeech.com/

Stumbled onto this useful link tonight - free text to MP3 file creation. My recording days are over!

RonM2