speakup using different synths with software speech?

[farhan Khan]

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.
>
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