TextAloud MP3

What works

Installation of the program. Loquendo voices and SAPI5 also installed flawlessly.
Conversion of text to voice works fine. Export TTS conversion to WAV files seems to work ok.

What does not

Sound and interface has a buggy behavior sometimes. Export to MP3 is buggy as well.

Workarounds

What was not tested

Further options.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

In order to use Loquendo voices, you have to install SAPI5. Download the SAPI5 msi installer here: www.webaloud.com/files/Microsoft-English-TTS-51.msi Then, you must run in terminal: wine msiexec /i Microsoft-English-TTS-51.msi Version 2.255 tested.

For those of you who can not figure out how to get TextAloud to work, I have the solution! You can now even have the SAPI5 and more advanced voices work!

Here are the steps that you take:

1) Download TextAloud and install it normally. (of course)
2) You must install SAPI4 and SAPI5. The problem is that neither of the official installers for either one seem to comply with wine, so I discovered that installing Speakonia also installs both SAPI4 and SAPI5 libraries with success. You can download Speakonia from here: http://www.cfs-technologies.com/home/?id=1.4
Installation of Speakonia is a piece of cake.

I'm not sure if you can uninstall it after you're done, since I'm not interested in going through the hassle again, but it's such a small app that I don't think it's worth uninstalling.

3) Now is the time to install any 3rd party voice add-ons. I installed the Jennifer voice from ScanSoft because it just sounds really good compared to the synthy voices that come with TextAloud. The higher quality 3rd party voices usually cost money though.

4) Open up TextAloud and it should load up normally. Don't be alarmed when you only find a few voices in the voice select and not the one you just installed. That means that TextAloud is only configured to use SAPI4 libraries, and most advanced voices require SAPI5. So in TextAloud, go to Options > Voice and File Options. Change to Use Both. A window might pop up, and just click ok. Now more voices including your 3rd party one (which was optional) will show up in the box underneath, so now you can exit out of the options.

There you have it! You should not be able to use TextAloud almost exactly like you were able to use it in Windows.