Hello, having a mixer would fix a lot of your soundcard problems. I normally use headphones when I edit anything though. The soundcards I have in my machine are a soundblaster 24bit, and the delta 2496. The soundblaster is for all the useless sound like screenreaders, windows sounds whatever. The delta does all the music and editing stuff. On 6/5/2009 6:22 AM, Tony Baechler wrote: > All, > > There still seems to be misunderstandings on what I'm trying to say. > Again, I really don't mind paying a reasonable amount for software > speech, assuming I can afford it. The problem is that I've never yet > heard software speech that I liked. The other problem is that I don't > like using non-free software but I don't think I could get used to > ESpeak. My favorite voice is the hardware DEC-talk Express. I can > use it to read books, email, work on my other Linux boxes, etc. I can > listen to it for hours without growing tired of it. It has a very > fast speech rate while still being understandable. It doesn't have a > muffle like most software synths, specifically the software DEC-talk. > It can easily be customized to have the exact pitch and inflection I > want. When I bought it, it was around $1200 US and is still worth it, > even though the price dropped since then. I understand that the USB > version isn't as flexible. I've tried many different sets of speakrs > for software speech, but all either have too much bass, a muffle or > static. Probably the best for reading was Realspeak but it was very, > very slow. I've even tried software speech on a high-end stereo > system. That did help, but it still wasn't as good as my old DEC-talk > Express. I guess my next favorite would be the Trippletalk, but it > mispronounces things and has other problems, like stuttering and a > fairly small text buffer. One really great thing about the DEC > Express is that if I'm reading and the power goes out, it stores at > least two screens of text in its buffer, so it will keep reading for a > few minutes. > > As I said, I'll look at Voxin. Perhaps it's not as bad as I think. I > know speakers do have a lot to do with it and it's partially what I'm > used to, but what I really want is to just use my hardware > synthesizers. Software speech is enough of an issue for me that I > have put off really exploring Orca. > > Also, one thing not mentioned here is my other reason for not leaving > Windows. That is a lack of GUI audio software. I'm surprised that no > one else has pointed this out, but a really big problem with software > speech and audio production is that you don't want speech in your > recordings. Even if you have multiple sound cards or a good > multichannel card, a good microphone will still pick up software > speech, I know from experience. Even if you use headsets, it's still > very inconvenient when you're doing restoration and editing to hear > speech in your ears at the same time as the sound you're concentrating > on. I work with old time radio shows which have many pops and > clicks. It's hard to hear the disc noise with speech chattering away > in my ears. On the other hand, with hardware speech I can't hear it > at all with a headset on, but at least I don't have to repeat the same > half second of sound multiple times because the speech wouldn't shut > up. That's the problem I'm having now on a Windows machine with only > software speech. I'm sure there's an easy solution, but the volume of > all software synths seems to dominate all other sound, even if the > volume is lowered. > > Michael Whapples wrote: >> As for voxin, if you weren't pleased by eloquence, you are unlikely >> to be pleased with voxin as it uses IBM viavoice which sounds the >> same as eloquence (or at least very close, I think the voices are >> very slightly different). >> >> As for contributing to espeak, you could suggest how it could sound >> better, it may not require altering the actual code it may be a >> matter of altering the voice files. I don't mean it in a bad way, but >> you seem to be hard to please with speech output, it may help if we >> knew what makes a voice good to you. > > _______________________________________________ > Speakup mailing list > Speakup at braille.uwo.ca > http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup >
