Natural Reader

What works

It installs without issue and it doesn't need NET add-ons etc. Note however that it is imperative that Wine is configured to emulate Windows 2000 prior to trying to install it, otherwise you receive a message telling you that no sound hardware was detected. The 'voices' also need to be installed and these are huge downloads 500-600meg per voice! I was entitled to 2 voices but only ever downloaded the one. These install without difficulties. Copying-and-pasting into the app. for on-the-fly playback of text files works fine. Converting to WAV files works some of the time...

What does not

Unfortunately converting to anything other than WAV files doesn't work. (so, no mp3 or ogg conversion). As suggested above, converting to WAV files works sometimes - about 50% of the time it crashes, closing without issuing any message.

Workarounds

What was not tested

I purchased the "Basic" version, so there is audio editing features etc. not functional. I've been using it almost daily for several years now, so pretty much everything has been tested.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

IMO this generates the best audio from text files, bar-none - or at least that was the case when I bought it initially! The price for this is the huge voice files it needs. I have several hundred ebook conversions done with it, not forgetting of course the essential use of native Linux apps like Wavbreaker & Sound Converter to complete the task! The Naturalreader application itself is 'tacky', though the later versions improved on this a bit - when run on Virtualbox, all of the later versions require NET 2.0 (yuck!) and none work at all with Wine. Wine 1.3.x has broken things though as it has started complaining about no sound hardware detected. Here's hoping the developers manage to fix whatever it is they have screwed up...