One of the steps to my manuscript clean up process, is listening to it. With some of my earlier works, I had spoken it out loud, but a novel this size takes ten hours, at a normal pace. Instead, for several years now, I’ve converted the text to a spoken file using the text-to-speech software built into the Mac. I then play the spoken version, while following along in the manuscript, fixing things as I go.<\/p>\n
I’ve used a variety of software tools to manage the conversion process. In the earlier days of Mac system 8 and 9, there was a size limit of 32 thousand characters that could be converted at one time. I wrote scripts to chop up the text into pieces and then convert each piece.<\/p>\n
Lately, I’ve been using ‘books2burn’ software by Matthew Weinstein. The ‘book burning’ is an analogy to CD song ripping and burning. The software does a good job of detecting chapters and splitting the text. I converted the novel into fifty AIFF files with books2burn, and then imported them into iTunes. I convert the AIFF to mp3 files for size reasons, and then delete the 1.5GB of AIFF files. iTunes makes a nice orderly player, with a quick pause button when I detect an error that I have to fix.<\/p>\n
I use the Vikki built-in voice, one of the better ones. The text-to-speech conversion is usable, although there are quirks. For example, ‘Okay’ comes out ‘kay’, and frequently hypenated words are spelled out, rather than spoken.<\/p>\n
Still, the end result is usable. In spite of the fact that writing and reading is a highly visual activity, deep in it’s roots, text is just codified speech, and so many textual errors are just invisible to my eyes. <\/p>\n
But when the sentence is spoken, some problems jump right out at me. It’s a time consuming process to listen to Vikki for hours on end, but it’s worth it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
One of the steps to my manuscript clean up process, is listening to it. With some of my earlier works, I had spoken it out loud, but a novel this size takes ten hours, at a normal pace. Instead, for several years now, I’ve converted the text to a spoken file using the text-to-speech software… Continue reading Listening to Vikki<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[1],"tags":[12,442,81],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4t90x-Sa","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3358"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3358"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3358\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3359,"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3358\/revisions\/3359"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3358"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3358"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3358"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}