One of the ideas I got for how to get more audiobooks for my Christmas trip to Texas arose like this:
1. There’s a bunch of freely available, public domain texts online, such as those at Project Gutenberg.
2. I bet I could download a text-to-speech program that would read these to me. Years ago, I had speech-to-text software that could also do text-to-speech. I was never very pleased with this software, but I figured that it would be possible to get a simpler version that just does text-to-speech and have my computer read these texts to me.
3. I then went to hotfiles.com and found some downloadable programs that do just this.
4. Some of these progams would speak the text directly into .mp3s for you.
5. Therefore, I could use the freely available e-texts in conjunction with the software to produce my own audiobooks in .mp3 and burn them to CD for listening on the way to Texas.
Yee-haw!
Now, turns out that the Project Gutenberg folks have already figured this out, so they have been adding their own homestyle audiobooks to their inventory. (Sven pointed this out in the comments box a couple of days back, but I had to delete it as it was a spoiler for this post.)
Iff’n yew want to make your own, however, you can also use the technique described above.
After looking at different text-to-speech programs, I decided to go with TextAloud, which is inexpensive and has a feature combination that I like. (Among other things, it dosen’t try to integrate itself into every other text app you have; programs that grabby are generally bad news.)
Since my Christmas trip to Texas didn’t happen this year, I haven’t used it to produce audiobooks for my pickup, yet, but I’ve been very pleased with using it to listen to all kinds of downloadable e-texts.
One of the nice things about it is that it supports multiple different voices, and the voices have improved amazingly in the last few years.
But that’s the subject of my next post. (Don’t want to spoil myself.)
Jimmy,
I’m so happy. On the EWTN website they have the Ignatius Bible on audio. (Awesome) They also have a book on audio called Lessons From The School Of Suffering. My birthday is in August and I’m going to ask Steve for those items for my birthday. This is wonderful and it will be the best present ever.
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backstage calendario
Adventures In Audiobooks #3
backstage calendario
Adventures In Audiobooks #3