Possible voice conflict or bug?

[DaveH]

I have a problem with Acapella and Ivona voices in that both become 'jerky' with incorrect pauses and occasional brief 'buzzing' noises.

I have reinstalled TA3 (3.0.26) and reinstalled the voices. This seemed to help, but after rebooting the computer, the problem recurs.

I find that selecting a voice and reloading voices in TA usually restores normal behaviour, but it must be done after every reboot.

This problem only started recently and it's not clear that anything in particular caused it.

My other voices (AT&T, Neospeech, Scansoft) don't seem to be affected.

Could there be some conflict between Ivona and Acapella voices or could this be a bug?

I would much appreciate any help as I have become very attached to Ivona Emma and Acapella Heather!

I am running Windows 7 64 bit on a Sony laptop (6 months old)

PS
I downloaded the Ivona voices on a 32 bit Windows XP machine and then installed on a Windows 7 64 bit machine.
I notice that voice updates reported on the 64 bit machine appear to be 64 bit (I haven't installed)
Does TA3 support 64 bit voices?
Thanks

[Jim Bretti]

That doesn't sound familiar to me, but the 'buzzing' part of your description suggests it *might* be related to your audio system. I can't explain why the problem would be limited to these two groups of voices, but try running through the audio problem checklist at http://nextup.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=6077 and see if that helps. If this doesn't help, duplicate the problem, then send me TextAloud debug files. Click Help -> Open Data Folder from the TextAloud menu, locate the files TextAloudMP3.dbg, TextAloudMP31.dbg, TextAloudMP32.dbg and TextAloudMP33.dbg, attach to an email and send to me at jim@nextup.com.

TA3 is 32 bit and supports only 32 bit voices. I think the Ivona voice installs include both 32 bit and 64 bit versions, so those voices should work with 32 bit apps like TextAloud as well as any 64 bit TTS apps you have.

[DaveH]

This problem was caused by scanning software, associated with a Seagate external backup drive, hogging resources. Disabling the scanning from the start-up menu rectified the problem. Seagate helpfully commented that the scanning doesn't have to be run continuously and can just be turned on when the backup disk is connected to the laptop.

Many thanks to Ken and Jim for helping with this.

Best support team I know!