On 6/12/2023 9:13 AM, Peter wrote:
> I want to help an older person with severe macular degeneration from
> thousands of miles afar where she could use an AUDIO file of long text
> (like of a book or short story, normally, as in Great Books stories).
>
> I'm on Windows 10 and Android 12. She's on the iPhone and iPads.
>
> I can easily save a web page (like a news story) to text and sometimes I
> can convert a PDF of a book to text (depending on how the PDF was made).
>
> But how can I turn the text into a "podcast" for her to listen to?
> And would it be too large to email to her in a typical email message?
>
You will need:
1) Copy of Audacity or a similar audio recorder.
2) Male to male audio cable. Connect Line Out to Line In.
This step, is to avoid fighting with "What You Hear" setup,
which could waste half the afternoon.
3) Run Firefox.
4) In Windows Mixer, set Windows Sounds (beeps and boops) to zero.
This is to avoid the Windows Defender toast notification or a
You Have Mail ding, from ruining your recording.
Now, use Firefox Reader View, open your text file.
[Picture]
https://i.postimg.cc/DzhXyywq/firefox-reader-view-TTS.gif
After listening to a half dozen other TTS implementations
that suck, that one is almost bearable.
With some programming, as Newyana2 describes, you can do better
than that, but then it's a real long project. This method
may not be efficient, but you also don't have to be a programmer.
The Firefox page should auto-scroll, as it plays the text. I do not
know how long a web page (or text file) can be, and whether your attempt to
convert War & Peace to sound, is going to work.
I may have recorded for 16 hours before with Audacity, but that
was on the other, smaller machine. Make sure all the steps of
recording and saving are working on Audacity, before your run.
You would not want to generate all those tiny sound files,
and have it croak before saving.
I think Windows also has an "improved" sound recorder, which
you might want to research. That's if you can't get Audacity
to work (which... happens sometimes). The namespace for audio
is a bitch. An "improved" sound recorder, is one for which
you don't have to "define a fixed size audio file" before
you begin recording. Some of the Windows demo apps have
been absurd that way. The damn thing should just record,
and then you do the Save As, and done. Check that it works
that way.
Paul