I designed the hardware and wrote the software for the now defunct Australian speaking clock. The prototype pieced together the audio from fragments and it did indeed take quite a bit of effort to get this to sound clean. Mismatches in sound levels at the boundaries caused 'pops', for example. I spent about a week with my headphones on.
Cheers Michael On Tue, Oct 1, 2019 at 12:08 PM Bob kb8tq <kb...@n1k.org> wrote: > > Hi > > Based on only dimly remembered conversations long long ago: > > Getting all the “message fragments” so they sound natural and not choppy is > not quite as easy as it seems at first. It’s by not quite rocket science, but > there > is more fiddling involved than one might think. > > One “solution” is to use fewer fragments and record larger portions of the > message. > Back in the day, storage limited your ability to record every message “full > up”. > > Assuming you record the “at the stroke the time will be” only once, the rest > is > under 3 seconds of audio. At maybe 16 bits / 32K sps. (yes that’s overkill). > this comes > up just under 200 K bytes. Recording the full time message for every minute > of the > day would be less than 270 megabytes. > > That’s a pretty small flash drive …. > > Bob > > > > > > On Sep 30, 2019, at 4:00 PM, Neville Michie <namic...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > > Here in Australia we are suffering the loss > > of one of the significant developments in accurate time keeping and > > dissemination. > > The talking clock, built in England, with sound tracks on rotating glass > > disks, > > has been on the Australian telephone system for more than half a century. > > The system was timed by quartz oscillators, synchronised to the local > > observatory time. > > Now in spite of the trivial cost of maintaining the system it has been > > removed by > > the money-hungry telco which took over the government run telephone system. > > Now it occurs to me that the sound tracks occupy a very small digital > > space, and > > with modern flash drives and a little logic the talking clock could be > > driven by > > any time nut's disciplined time source. > > So is there a time nut who could design a voice output that we could all > > use? > > > > “At the third stroke the time will be…” > > > > cheers, > > Neville Michie > > _______________________________________________ > > time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@lists.febo.com > > To unsubscribe, go to > > http://lists.febo.com/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts_lists.febo.com > > and follow the instructions there. > > > _______________________________________________ > time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@lists.febo.com > To unsubscribe, go to > http://lists.febo.com/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts_lists.febo.com > and follow the instructions there. _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@lists.febo.com To unsubscribe, go to http://lists.febo.com/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts_lists.febo.com and follow the instructions there.