By now, hopefully most of you are resting up and enjoying the warmth after a great school year! My goal is to continue posting regularly to the blog on Fridays over the summer. So, here we go!
Text to Audio vs. Text to Speech: If you’ve been to any of my audio-text workshops or have been doing any work with digital text, you probably realize that text to speech happens as your computer reads text. I’ve blogged about a few of these text to speech programs for the Mac OS platform these last few weeks. However, Text to Audio is a little different in that the computer is not reading the text outloud, but is converting the text to an audio file, like an mp3 or mp4, etc. Ghostreader that I blogged about last week is one good one for the Mac. I’m still looking for additional alternatives. BUT, once you get an audio file, you might need to convert it from one format to another. For example, for a grad class I’m teaching this summer, I’m podcasting all of the classes as a reference/review tool for the learners. The recording device I used this morning, only recorded a WMA file, which is not very useful on a Mac. So…
(FREE) Switch for Mac will convert wma to just about anything else: http://www.nch.com.au/switch/
However, to even begin to work with WMA files on a Mac, you also need to do a one-time install of this little piece of software called Flip4Mac, which is also free: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/player/wmcomponents.mspx
This created the conversion for me from the unusable wma file on my Mac to a standard mp3 file that I was able to add to the podcast.
By: Antonio on June 10, 2008 
By: Marilou Vander Griend on October 3, 2008 