April 2005

[[1 - Greetings - Win an MP3 Player from NextUp!]
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Hello from NextUp.com!

Congratulations to Tony S., who won our previous drawing for a NextUp.com t-shirt.  This month one lucky winner will receive a Rave-MP 256 MB Sport MP3 Player, so be sure to read on for details on how you can enter the drawing.  Thanks for staying tuned!

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[2 - NextUp.com Announces Arnaud from AT&T Natural Voices]
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We are happy to announce we are now selling Arnaud, a great new Canadian French voice from AT&T Natural Voices

http://www.nextup.com/attnv.html

We've had a lot of demand for a Canadian French voice and we think you'll love Arnaud, so be sure to check out this exciting new voice from AT&T Natural Voices.

Arnaud is only $35 USD and is available for high-speed download or on CD.  You can purchase him at

https://www.plimus.com/jsp/buynow.jsp?contractId=1629594

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[3 - TextAloud Customer Survey for Online Learning Use]
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We hear from many of you who are pursuing degrees through online education at schools like the University of Phoenix and others.  TextAloud is a natural fit for education, and especially so for programs where the learning materials are already in electronic text format.  If you are pursuing your degree while working you'll also appreciate how TextAloud can turn your commute or other downtime into productive study time to help you perform better in school.  You can listen on your PC, or save your study materials to MP3 or WMA files to bring with you to the gym, in the car, or anyplace you go.

This is a fast-growing use and we'd like to hear from those of you who have tried it.  Please take a moment to complete this brief survey

http://www.nextup.com/onlinelearningsurvey.html

to help us serve you better.

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[4 - New Outlook Plugin coming - Beta Testers Needed]
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In the never ending process of improving TextAloud, we are developing a plugin for use with Outlook.  For those that use Outlook as your email client (not Outlook Express), the plugin will allow you to easily select emails and have them spoken or added to TextAloud as new articles.  We need a handful of experienced users who are interested in this functionality to help test it and give us your feedback.  If you are interested, email us at support@nextup.com and let us know.

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[5 - TextAloud Tip of the Month - Working with Pauses]
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Depending on the voices you use, you may wish to adjust pauses or silence in TextAloud speaking.  Pauses can make text sound more natural and make it easier to understand.  There are two methods for adjusting pauses.

Predefined Pauses:
You can adjust how much silence there is after sentences and paragraphs in TextAloud.  By default each voice will have some amount of silence at the end of a sentence.  Typically voices do not automatically add additional silence at the end of paragraphs, but adding some can increase comprehension.  Within TextAloud 2.0, if you choose Options-->TextAloud Options on the main menu, then click the Predefined Pauses TAB, you'll find 2 settings you can adjust.

Sentence Pause Interval is the amount of additional silence to add to the end of each sentence.  Paragraph Pause Interval is the amount of additional silence to add to the end of each paragraph.  Change the default 0 to the number of seconds you'd like added for each of these.  For example, if you'd like an additional one and a half seconds of silence added at the end of each sentence, change this value to 1.5.  If you'd like a longer pause after paragraphs, set this value to 3 for example.

Manual Pauses:
In addition, there may be times when you manually want to insert silence.  This can help if you are creating audio files and you need to improve the flow or comprehension of the audio.  To insert a manual pause, click at the spot in the text where you'd like to insert the pause.  Next, right-click, and from the popup menu, choose "Insert Pause".  A popup menu will appear with several predefined values, or choose "User Defined" to specify exactly how many seconds of pause you would like included.  TextAloud will insert a special pause tag in the text, which looks something like "{{Pause=0.5}}".  In this case, a 1/2 second silence will be inserted into the audio.

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[6 - New Feature - Content Site of the Month]
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We often get suggestions from our users detailing web sites they frequently use to gather interesting listening material from.  These range from ebook sites to Internet news sites and are great free sources for news, information, and entertainment.  So, we thought we'd start sharing those with everyone in a monthly feature in our newsletter.

This months featured site is

http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/ebooks/

This is the ebook library from the University of Virginia.  With over 1,800 publicly available ebooks, this site provides an excellent source for classic British and American fiction as well as children's literature and various history books.  Books are available in several formats including web only formats which work well with TextAloud.

If you have favorite sites you use with TextAloud, pass them along to us at support@nextup.com.

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[7 - Enter to Win a Rave-MP 256 MB Sport MP3 Player]
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We have tons of people enjoying the benefits of using TextAloud in combination with a portable audio device like the iPod, a PocketPC, flash memory MP3 players, or CD players.  This can free you up to listen to email, web pages, or any electronic text on the go.  This month's contest prize is a new Rave-MP 256 MB sport digital audio/MP3 player.  It has a memory card expansion slot to increase your capacity to 512 MB, and a USB 2.0 connection for high-speed transfers.  

All you have to do to enter is tell us about how and where you listen on the go (or would like to if you win this player).  Send your email to

newsletterdrawing@nextup.com

We'll draw a winner from entries received by Friday, April 29 to win a Rave-MP 256 MB Sport MP3 Player.  Thanks and best of luck!

If you find our products useful, please share the news with your friends and at your place of business.  We offer Volume Pricing with Site Licensing available to schools, organizations and businesses.  If you'd like more information on this or have questions about any of our products, please don't hesitate to contact us at

support@nextup.com

Thank you for your interest in our company & products. 

The NextUp.com Team
NextUp.com
The Power of Spoken Audio
http://www.NextUp.com

A Division of NextUp Technologies, LLC


 

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