Office Apps can Sound Good

Continued from page: 1

Friday, April 12, 2002

Software: Text To Mp3

Better-Text to Mp3 let’s you covert text files to MP3s, WAV or WMA formats. This feature can be used to convert lengthy Web pages, novels or stories into audio files, which any one can listen to later. You can even stream these audio files to your network, so that any one can tune in and listen to them.

It places an icon on the desktop after installation. The interface is divided into three sections—one for showing text files, second for wave files and the third for MP3 files. Start by adding a text file in the text files pane by clicking on the Text menu and choosing Add files. You can place a text file (.txt), Word document, Web page, or even an XML document. A neat feature of the application is that it has a built-in text parser for DOC, HTML and XML files, so only the text in these documents will be converted to audio. All other formats are opened in ASCII format, so if you open say a RTF, you’ll also get a lot of junk characters. For these files, it’s better to copy the text to the clipboard and then add it to the Text-To-MP3 application. Once you copy text to clipboard, go to the Text Menu and choose Add text from clipboard. 

Click on the black arrow icon after adding text files. This opens a menu from where you can choose to convert all added files into a single file or convert each file into individual audio files. Take your pick and it will convert them to MP3 or WAV depending on your selection and will appear under MP3 files section or the WAV files pane. By default, all converted files are stored in C:\Program Files\TextToMp3\Books. You can change this from the Options>Setting menu under the Player tab. 
Before converting your text into audio files, you can choose from the different voices, and select the voice speed. This can easily be done from the drop-down menu on the top toolbar. Additional options are available under the Options menu to select things like the bit rate for converting, the output file type (left, right, mono, stereo, etc), the default directory for storing converted files and more.

Software: Please Read

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