Paul, I haven't listened to this yet because I'm mostly on Athena these days and I don't really feel comfortable listening to fanfic there, headphones or not <g>. But I did want to comment on the TTS option.
I used to run fanfic off to mp3s all the time. A few years ago I had a data entry job that let us listen to music all day. But at 40 hours a week, I exhausted my music collection pretty quickly. I turned to audio books from the library, but they required a lot of prior planning (ie, requesting a title and waiting for it to be sent to the library near me, and then actually going to the library and picking it up... I couldn't do this on the spur of the moment.) And they didn't always have the books I wanted. What I really wanted was to be able to listen to fanfic <g>. So I went in search of TTS software, and I came up with
NextUp\'s TextAloudMP3 . I could paste a bunch of fanfic into it, set it up to convert overnight (it read pretty quickly, but I used to give it a
lot to read <g>. I think it could convert anywhere from 10x to 50x; that is, 1 minute conversion for 10-50 minutes of audio.), and then transfer the files to my mp3 player in the morning and take it to work with me. Not quite spur of the moment, but pretty quick and more convenient than going to the library. I did all my Kerth "reading" aurally that year
You do have to get used to the voices. They don't sound like a normal person. You just have to accept that they'll never be perfect. But after a while I noticed that sometimes they intoned things differently than I might have imagined, and it made me think about the story differently <g>. Once in a while my computer reader could teach me something
It's been a while since I used TA, since I don't have that data entry job anymore, but I think I used to prefer AT&T's Crystal voice.
The other thing to be aware of is that if the computer doesn't know a word, it'll try to sound it out. Sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn't. With TextAloud you can "teach" it the proper pronunciation of words you use often (names, etc); I assume similar programs work the same way.
Anyway, there's a 15-day trial of TA available on their website. This comes with just the standard voices, which aren't as good as some of the others you have to pay for but should give you a good idea what they sound like and you can decide whether or not to purchase one of the better ones. I also still have several old audio files that I made this way. If anyone is curious in hearing what they sound like, I'd be happy to share for demonstration purposes
Honestly, I adored this software when I had the data entry job. Kept me awake at work more often than I'd like to admit <g>. One of the biggest user testimonials on their webpage is mine
Kaylle
