Adapting pre-existing stories to new formats

[Darmani]

Heard of Zamzar?

Or MacSpeak? Put in text and out comes speech.

Its one basic way to change a text into spoken mp3/sound file.

I am sorry it just seems my focus and circumstances is such I can't sit and read off a screen as much as I used to.

So anyone up to or have means to adapt a stories into an audio story?

HAve you tried? What have been your results success?

Would anyone be willing to try a skyped/group reading or make an audio book ala a podcast or something?

Just asking.

Currently gotten How to Takedown a Superhero, Playing with FanTCdude's Toys, Twelves Steps, Changing Nick, Fortitude, others converted.

Some warnings. Be careful of the encoding and format you use. Carefully check when saving file as txt its format comes out right and the spacing is decent too.

Stories with poor grammar, too much slang, or capitilization can come off wrong. Though zamzar converts pdfs to mp3s when I tried it with HtTaS it had waaaay more spelling out of words and errors. Also without a membership its a little time consuming. Oddly enough have had failure with The obelisk a mostly straight mc story being converted. *shrugs*

[tekuno]

Originally Posted by Darmani

Or MacSpeak?

Not really necessary in most versions of Mac OS X. TextEdit has had a "speak text" command since some really early version, so any text you can copy and paste has always been "speakable" without an extra program. And in later versions of the OS, speech is just part of the standard Edit menu.

You can also convert text files to audio files using the command line or AppleScript. The following AppleScript will ask for a text file and save it to an audio file (tested on 10.8):

on run
try
with timeout of 1 * weeks seconds
set t to ""
set f to choose file of type "txt"
set f to open for access f without write permission
try
set t to read f as string
close access f
on error msg number num
try
close access f
end try
error msg number num
end try
set o to choose file name with prompt "Where should the file be saved?" default name "Untitled.AIFF"
say t saving to o
end timeout
on error msg number num
beep
display dialog "Could not convert the file because an error of type " & num & " occurred. The message accompanying the error was:" & return & return & msg
end try
end run

(This could be expanded to do all sorts of other things, such as letting you choose a voice, etc. As it is, it merely uses the system defaults.)

[Darmani]

thanks, I only do PC but man you've really thought about this. You do it regularly yourself?

[tekuno]

Not really. That was a standard AppleScript error-handling-friendly "open this text file and dump the contents to this command" setup, combined with the "say" command (and its little-known "dump the output to a file" option).

And Mac text-to-speech has been around a long, long time. (Macintalk, the first version of it, was around in 1984!)

I have done some text-to-sound-files work before to generate anonymous narration, but it was way more work than you'd want to spend -- more than would be practical for a whole story. On Apple's system, the computer can either read text directly and guess at the pronunciation (which is what you would basically have to use for stories, and what Project Gutenberg's computer-read audiobooks use, and which sounds pretty terrible), or else you can use special syntax involving lots of brackets and phoneme codes and intonation codes and things and get a more realistic result -- but it takes extra time to do that, and after doing about a paragraph you would probably want to give up.

[I<3Muscles]

In all honesty, the easiest, most erotic way to do this is probably record your own voice. But that's a bitch to do, and I'm also going to assume that it's pretty hard to get off on your own voice.

If you've got Mac then text-to-speech is incredibly easy to do. Windows has something like that too but it's nowhere near as robust and requires messing with command prompt

[Darmani]

bumped for asking with help tp do this with Windows xp laptop so not deal with Zamzar and five at a time stuff

[jenyanderson]

Currently gotten How to Takedown a Superhero, Playing with FanTCdude's Toys, Twelves Steps, Changing Nick, Fortitude, others converted.

[Darmani]

Uhm I don't see your reply