Hi Greg
This works, but it often chokes on large files, I find anything over
about 150k or so seems to cause this to fail. What always seems to
work for me is to create a little automater workflow with the
following actions:
get current textedit document
text 2 audio file
You can then open the document and run the workflow and it doesn't
seem to choke on large files, I've recorded several large books this
way. A few things to note:
At the top of the text file, if you don't like the voice's default
rate, make sure you specify it with a speech manager command, like so:
[[rate 250]]
You'll have to experiment to figure out which rate value you like,
they do not map to Voiceover values. For example, with alex, I have
him at rate 80 in VoiceOver, which corresponds to rate 350 in the
speech manager command above.
A final note: Do not do the aiff 2 mp3 or whatever conversion with
iTunes, as the aiff is at 22 khz, and iTunes does not support encoding
at this lower rate, and encoding it any higher gives some very nasty-
sounding artifacts all through your audio. To do the conversion, I
highly agree with Greg's suggestion of using Max, it's free and can do
all kinds of audio conversions and encodings.
As for the copyright info, if it's on every page of the PDF you'll get
it on every page of the text, unless you use the replace functions of
textedit to get rid of it.
hth
On Feb 7, 2008, at 6:00 PM, Greg Kearney wrote:
Here is one way to do this:
1. Open the PDF and do a select all (Command-A) and then a copy
(Command-C)
2. Open a new text document and do a paste. Save this as a text only
(ASCII) file.
3. Open the terminal and enter the following command: say -v voice -
o /path/to/audio.aiff -f /path/to/file.txt
Voice is he name of any system voice Alex, Fred, etc this will
generate a AIFF audio file of the text which can then be transformed
into MP3 with iTunes or another audio conversion program such as
Max, which is very good and I can recommend it.
Greg Kearney
535 S. Jackson St.
Casper, Wyoming 82601
307-224-4022
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
On Feb 7, 2008, at 6:41 PM, Orin wrote:
Hi all,
Is there a way that I could record PDF documents with Alex? I just
downloaded a PDF file and can successfully read it in preview, but
I'd honestly rather have it in mp3 format. Also, it'd be nice if I
can only have the copyright information at the beginning and end,
whenever I go to a new page in preview it gives me the copyright
info on every page, kind of annoying.
What's wierd with VoiceOver, is that Alex, even when there isn't a
comma, pauses as if there was one. With the system voice, it
doesn't do this, so I would like it to be recorded with the system
voice. I would also like to raise the speed a bit, the default is
extremely slow.
Thanks.
