TextAloud 4 Wish List

[vmars316]

Greets,
TextAloud 4 Wish List
How about we start a newSticky thread called:
"TextAloud 4 Wish List"
Then we can all request our Wishes for TextAloud4
Thanks...Vernon

[Jim Bretti]

We'll hold off on creating a TextAloud 4 sticky for the time being ... just go ahead and post your suggestions here, or send emails to support@nextup.com

[voiceboxer]

vmars,

You had the idea, what are your wishes? I am sure if you submit a list of the computed changes you would like made to somewhere like a IT staffing agency that they might be able to get you some freelancers to help make it happen. There are so many resources right now in the IT and computing world that there is never an excuse for not trying. I say we get this thing up and running by taking advantage of some IT knowledge shared on these forums.

[vmars316]

vmars,

You had the idea, what are your wishes?

Gladly:
I would like to see a TAG called <repeat,x> </repeat>
Where x is #of times to repeat.
Or, <repeat>the old dog <repeat,x>

Something along those lines.
Thanks...vmars

[PHenry1026]

Oh what a tangled web we weave,
When first we practise to deceive!

Sir Walter Scott, Marmion, Canto vi. Stanza 17.
Scottish author & novelist (1771 - 1832)

[Triplicate]

-Support for Acrobat Reader.

-Better clipboard support.
Right now there are too many steps to have a block ot text read. Copy>Wait for popup>Scroll through selections>Select Speak Text>Click on Perform Button.Way too many steps. This can be made much simpler.
Why not something simple like Copy>Click on "Speak Text" or Copy>AltS? Even more useful would be support for "right click" popup for Speak Text after having selected a block of text.

Even if there is no support for pdf reader you still have to imporve support for copying of a block of text. I use this all the time even while I type this message to check for spelling and grammar.

Also why do we have to find "Speak Text" in a pick list? This should be the default selections without having to scroll through all the other LESS used options today. This alone would be a BIG improvement taking all of 15 minutes to change today.

Without support for Acrobat we have to use copy to copy a block of text multiple times to get through a pdf file, so it's VERY important to simplify the above operations.

[Jim Bretti]

Thanks for the feedback. Support for Acrobat is on our to do list, we get lots of requests for that.

On the clipboard support, here are some things that might help in TA3

From the TextAloud main window, click Tools -> Clipboard and Mouse Speak Options, and select the Clipboard Options tab. There are some options available here that may help. First you can configure the default action, so you have the option of making "Speak Text" the default. In addition, there is a checkbox labeled "Set Last Action as Default Action". With this checkbox selected, TextAloud remembers the selected action when you click the Perform button, and will use that action as the default the next time the clipboard prompt is displayed.

Next, it is possible to configure the buttons on the Clipboard prompt. By default, the buttons displayed on the clipboard prompt are "New", "Append" and "Ignore". If you right click the "New" / "Append" buttons, a popup menu is displayed allowing you to set the action associated with the button.

Finally, you can bypass the clipboard prompt completely by setting up a TextAloud hotkey for speaking text. Look under the TextAloud menu, and click Tools -> Hotkey Setup. This dialog allows you to configure a system wide hotkey to be used for speaking selected text in any application.

[Triplicate]

Wonderful... I'm sorry I have never discovered this. Thanks for the quick reply and setting me straight. The shortcut key is awsome! I just highlight text (no need to copy) and just hit AltS in my case... Done! This is the best!

Keep up the good work!

[kugelblitz]

Feature Request
- Pronunciation Dictionary Exchange through a online database.

[pblais]

Flatten the interface for batch converter to one pop up screen with all the options. The default output folder is a worthless setting since it uses the last folder specified as the default no matter what the default is in the settings. It means it never gets used:) Eliminate the status on the main screen for batch conversion since it belongs on the other window.

Allow batch converter to be multi threaded so you can convert multiple things at a time yet still use the main screen. Most multi core processors will handle it just fine. With RAM so cheap you really can't use enough to matter.

A command line interface to the batch converter would be extra nice too. I would like to pass the MP3 tags from a batch file since I can generate them. Support for a pre and a post conversion external command would be most welcome as well. I could use all this for doing large scale conversion of TXT libraries. I've written my own text pre-processor to scrub out all the things you don't want pronounced plus chunks it up into specified sizes based on sentence boundaries.

The newer LAME 3.99.1 has really got a much nicer encoder for MP3. It's much faster. I've been making WAV files then using that for the MP3 conversion and it's exceptionally fast when you match the bit rate to the voice making the WAV files. That feature is very much appreciated as it helps on the post MP3 compression. Currently, the LAME conversion from WAV to MP3 runs about 6 times faster than the WAV encoder. With the Acapela voices the bottom line quality is - most exceptional!

[mos6507]

Last time I asked for command-line support for TextAloud I ran into complications. It had something to do with the TTS vendors being paranoid that you're gonna turn the thing into a client-server architecture to get around licensing.

I would like to see TextAloud do a better job of chopping silence out of the tail of its audio files. The TTS engines often tack on a little silence but it causes problems for me. This is a longshot but it would also be nice if it supported pitch-shifting per tags for TTS engines that don't support pitch (like Nuance).

[ukstudent]

Yes, PDF support like: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1Bz_-NgYd4

[SFCurley]

Would really like to see a dialect-wide selection option in the pronunciation editor, so for example, I could setup one dictionary to apply to all my non-US English voices).

[epsilon85]

TaxAloud IN FRENCH language if you please.