(consider it cc:by)
a toaster
sits alone
atop a counter
where nothing goes
…
oh toaster
you look so lonely
won’t you warm up
this waffle…
just for me?
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Categories
Mac OS X Text to Speech
I recently worked on a project that required making audio files out of text files, which is something I’ve done before, but haven’t done regularly since 2000 or so when I was making cassette tapes of web pages. There’s a simple way to do this using Mac OS X.
Open you System Preferences and go to Keyboard and select the Keyboard Shortcuts pane. Click on Services and scroll down to Text until you see Add to iTunes as a Spoken Track and check that box.
Now open TextEdit and select some text and control-click (or right click depending on your computer input device) and you’ll see a contextual menu item for Add to iTunes as a Spoken Track. Select it.
Now jump over to iTunes and you’ll see the track. It’ll be called Text to Speech.
In iTunes you can highlight your track and select the File menu and then Show in Finder (or just hit command-R) and the Finder will open the folder containing your file. It’s an MPEG-4 Audio file (also known as an AAC file) with an m4a extension.
ITunes can obviously convert the file to an MP3 for you, but if you want another format (like OGG) you can use Audacity. You should be able to do whatever you need to do with it from there, (And that whatever you need to do with it bit was the deciding factor for this specific project.)
I was really hoping to use an existing test-to-speech API on the web to automatically generate the audio. Google has an unofficial Text-To-Speech API (go on, try it.) Seeing as it’s “unofficial” and didn’t work in the way I wanted to use it, and there is an awesome group where people ask about APIs and ToS and no one answers, I skipped it.
AT&T also has a great text to speech demo online, which clearly spells out how you can’t use it, which is quite helpful. (Basically you can’t use it for anything public or commercial, which sucks, but I’m glad they come right out and say it.)
There are other options (almost all commercial) including services like iSpeech, which I may look into. There may be some open source text to speech options, but as to how good they are, or how easy they are to get up and running, that is yet to be seen… or heard, as it were.
(Note: I’ve got a follow-up post coming about Mac OS X Text to Speech via the command line.. stay tuned!)
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I Googled Apple
I swear I won’t use the word “evil” or “conspiracy” in this post, but…
This seems weird to me. I used Google to search for “Apple, Inc.” and I got a search result for “www.apple.com” with the title showing “Apple Computer, Inc.”
Now, as you know, “Apple Computer, Inc.” recently changed it’s name to “Apple Inc.” so I wasn’t sure why Google showed it as “Apple Computer, Inc.” I then went to www.apple.com and the title of the page is just “Apple” not even “Apple Inc.”
So that begs the question… What’s up? If they indexed the page the same as they index every other site on the web, why does it not match? Is Apple feeding a different result to the Googlebot? (A quick test with Perl’s LWP::UserAgent says probably not.) So really… what’s going on? I’d like to know…
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Another Fail
I know I’m in a small minority, but I actually like having things under my control. My web site, and even my comments… and if they fail, well, they fail. Everything fails at some point, but I guess I feel more comfortable knowing that when things fail there is at least some chance I can do something to fix it. Reboot the database server, reboot the web server.. something. When a cloud(ish) service fails, I just feel totally helpless. Like some kitten in a silly photo.
And while it’s fun to look at silly photos of kittens if you’re not the kitten, it may not be as much fun if you are the kitten.
(And yes, I am aware of the irony in this post, life is an ironic thing, or so I’m told.)
(consider it cc:by)
Apple Inc. came out with something new today an ZOMG it does something cool and I don’t know what it is but it’s better than the old one and holds more things and has more other things so yes I will need it when can I order it? Also, is it shiny? I hope it’s shiny! Or black! Black is good to. Maybe shiny on one side and black on the other? Is it made out of glass, or made out of metal, or some amazing combination of glass and metal!? Like a damn spaceship!
But really, Apple Inc. is the maker of fine consumer electronic devices for your Digital Lifestyle™. (Also, they make computers.)