Hi Darcy, Jane, Cara, and Others, I've been following the threads on Automator work flows using text to speech for text files and RSS feeds. As Darcy points out, the files that get produced are really large and there isn't an option to change voice speed. I played around with this, and you can add steps that will convert the files into a more compact file when you import it into iTunes (with the Podcast aac file setting), and also delete the source file, but you can't get around generating the original files at sizes of about 10 MB for each minute of spoken text.
There's a way to play back the spoken files at faster speed, but it isn't as good as recording text with the options for setting voice speaking rate under the Speech preferences. I posted about using AppleScripts to speed up playback in listening to podcasts in this thread in the mail archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/discuss%40macvisionaries.com/msg11002.html While iTunes doesn't have options for faster playback, QuickTime does, and the scripts switch playback over to QuickTime. It doesn't preserve pitch (there's other software shareware designed for musicians that can change speed and maintain pitch), but it's pretty workable. Jane, you might consider a service like Talkr (that's not a typo, it's spelled that way) that allows you to listen to feeds with mp3 files: http://www.talkr.com/faq/what_is_talkr.html I haven't tried this, but they originally started out as a subscription service where you could subscribe to at least 3 feeds a month for free, and they would "autocast" blogs and feeds into mp3 files that you could download. There used to be a charge for 20 hours/month of about $4.95, but now it seems to be free. You should make sure that you subscribe to a full text feed rather than just a summary, since sometimes both are available. There's also a similar company in the UK named Speakwire at: http://www.speakwire.com/ I know they use British voices, but I don't know about their services or their charging scheme. Hope this helps. Cheers, Estehr On Nov 25, 2007, at 06:07PM, Darcy Burnard wrote: >Hi Jane. Well I made an automator work flow that does what you want, >but I don't think it's very practical. Here are the actions I used. > >New Text Edit Document. >Get feeds from mail, with options set to only return feeds with unread >articles. >Filter articles, with options set to only return unread articles. >Get permalinks of articles. >Get text from web page. >Set contents of text edit document, with options set to append text. > >I'm not sure if you've played with automator or not. If not, the >above probably didn't make a lot of sense. But at any rate, what you >get is an insanely large text file with the contents of every web page >that contained an unread article. This would be quite difficult to >read through, and it would probably be much easier to just open up >safari on the articles you were interested in. >Darcy > >On 25-Nov-07, at 10:04 PM, Jane Jordan wrote: > >> And where do I findit? :) >> >> Jane >> >> >> On Nov 25, 2007, at 9:51 PM, Darcy Burnard wrote: >> >>> There is an automator action that will get rss articles and put >>> them in to a text format. I'd imagine you could then put that text >>> in to a text edit document. >>> Darcy >>> >>> On 25-Nov-07, at 9:35 PM, Jane Jordan wrote: >>> >>>> OK, now I am subscribed to all of these RSS feeds--and I thought >>>> it would be fairly simple, that the whole story would appear in my >>>> inbox, but it doesn't. I get a link to the story. So what I was >>>> wondering was if somehow a script could be made that when new RSS >>>> feeds come in, Safari opens i the background, and the text is put >>>> into textEdit or something for me to read later. >>>> >>>> Possible? If so, how? :) >>>> >>>> Jane >>> > > >
