Recording the text to speech-generated audio to my internal drive
Hello everyone :o)
I would like to use the text-to-speech function on my Mac and record this output to a stereo file on my internal drive. The computer text-to-speech gives an aesthetic that I like a lot in several of the languages that I will be using. Is there a max patch that I can use to do this? Or another method that is non-Max, that is not too difficult to understand?
Kind regards
David
Brighton, UK
You can do that via the terminal command ‘say’
Hi Jan,
Thanks for your reply. I am a novice user.
I'll expand: I need the recordings of what is said in two files written to audio files .wav1 and .wav2 for example, as a test to see if my project is going to be possible...... before I plough ahead with a much more ambitious project using longer sets of bilingual texts by Picasso. I have 9 2-500 word chunks in two languages ready-to-go. And I want to razor cut them and apply changing FX and intertwine the voices: one Spanish and one in English. I thought that would be better done in a DAW for high precision.
I am a novice user and I used the drop down 'edit' menu and pressed the 'speech' options; I heard what I wanted and then tried to write my favourite segments in different languages to disk.
But the means how to do this brought me here. And I failed with Soundflower because there was some issue, I can't remember now, about "signing by Matt Ingalls" preventing me making a step in the installation.
fyi I am using MAX 8.2.1 on a M1 (2020) Silicon AirBook under macOS 12.2
If anyone could help. I can try to be more precise when I've slept.
Thanks Jan
Sorry Jan -
generate the two files by the terminal command 'say'... and how do I write them to disc, specifying the name, audio format, and language to be used? I this the terminal that is the UNIX shell? I am really on shakey ground here.
Kind regards,
David,
Brighton, UK
say is the command to use in terminal.
It can output spoken text into audio file, which is what you want.
https://ss64.com/osx/say.html
example :
say -o ~Desktop/test1.wav --data-format=LEI16@44100 "thgis is test one"
should write file test.1.wav 16/44100 to desktop.
I don't know which formats are really supported by say command.
default write format is aiff.
you can check afconvert to find syntax used for different audio file format and types
in terminal type afconvert --help-formats
P.S.
once you sort that out using terminal,
you can try to use shell object in max
Salut Qubit,
sorry for my short remark. I was on my cell phone.
you can open the terminal by typing Terminal into the spotlight search. Source Audio already elaborated a bit on how to find information on how to use the command. if you are all new to it there will most likely some YouTube videos where someone shows how to use say in the terminal (there is a YouTube video for everything I believe :))) )
The fileformat/codec that are supposed are determined by the voice you are using as far as I remember. not all voices have the same capabilities.
you can select the voice either as an argument in the say command or just set it in the MacOS settings - again if I remember it correctly . it’s been a while since I used say,…
I hope that get you started.
cheers