I use Audacity here. It's much better than anything I ever used on Windows, although it does work there as well. As for cutting off speech, there are a couple of things you can do. Firstly, Orca has the ability to silence speech by holding down the modifier key, usually the keypad insert key or the caps lock key and pressing s. The speech comes back if you press the same combination again. Also, if you want the benefits of hardware speech without the cost, try a USB sound card such as a Soundblaster mp3. I use this as an example because that's the one I have and it works quite well here. Using Pulseaudio, you can play the speech, system sounds and whatever else on one device and edit your audio using Audacity on the other device. Pulseaudio also helps the volume issue where the speech always seems to be quieter than the mp3 you may be playing at the same time. You can use the Pulseaudio volume control to adjust the volume of every sound on your system. So if the music is too loud, you can easily turn it down, or if you need the speech louder, you can turn it up. This is the same system you can use to move sound from one device to another. You just use the right-click menu on the sound you want to move instead of adjusting the volume. As for trying Voxin, although the price is quite reasonable, Voxin is just another packaged version of a very old speech synthesizer that hasn't been updated in about 7 or 8 years and depends on libraries that were somewhat outdated even then. So far, the Voxin team has been able to force it to work, but they will never be able to guarantee how much longer it will work. The libraries that the underlying synthesizer are linked against grow more and more obsolete with each passing day, and the source is not available to anyone, so even the Voxin package maintainers are unable to rebuild it against newer system libraries. Frankly, I'm quite surprised that they have been able to force it to work anywhere near this long, and it's only a matter of time before it will stop working with no hope of ever speaking again. My suggestion would be to use eSpeak and please, please, please report any problems you may have with it, and if you are skilled as a programmer, correct what you can. I personally find eSpeak much easier to listen to for much longer periods of time than DECtalk, Voxin/Eloquence/ViaVoice/IBMTTS/TTSynth/whatever it's called from one minute to the next or any hardware synthesizer I ever heard, not to mention the fact that it is free as in speech and beer. About the only things that sound better to me are the so-called human sounding synthesizers, but they are nonfree and take tons and tons of memory. They are also nearly incapable of producing intelligible speech at over 200 words per minute, so eSpeak is still the best choice if you need something that can be understood at high speeds. Pacon kaj longan vivon, (Peace and long life), Lorenzo -- Nia diligenta kolegaro En laboro paca ne laci?os, ?is la bela son?o de l' homaro Por eterna ben' efektivi?os. --La Espero, himno de Esperanto
