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Re: [school-discuss] falling costs of producing audio books



How many of these steps could be 'outsourced' to those with spare cpu cycles?

I've got spare time on several PC's in the area, and would be glad to have them become useful rather than mostly ornamental. Might the additional results outweigh the additional management and control to get this done? If there's already a process or schedule for doing this, I'd like to learn more and participate if possible. Artistic creator I'm not, but cpu cycles I've got...

Respond directly to jmunro@uvi.edu if that's more appropriate.

John Munro
Univ of the Virgin Islands
StCroix Campus USVI


At 08:14 AM 12/21/2002 -0600, Mr. Eschman wrote:
... meanwhile, we are continuing to move the technology forward in three
directions (marked A, B and C):

A- the gutenberg group wants to rip audio books on the fly.  last year, our
technology to do that produced a mono-tone voice, that was hypnotic - it put
you to sleep.  today, we can rip a book on the fly that has a reasonably
engaging inflection.  this resulted directly from focusing on the effect
consonant patterns have on a "steady state" audio generator, that is, a sound
generate that produces a certain number of phenoms per time unit, as viavoice
appears to be (this is speculation, because the source code is not available,
and the speculation is based on more than a year of observations].

unfortunately, running redhat linux 7.2 on an atlalon 900 with .5 gig of
memory and a typical ide drive, it takes about 2.5 hours to complete a book
like war of the worlds.  fortunately, no single chapter takes over ten
minutes.  (this abberation in arithmetic is accounted for by our not having a
dedicated box to rip audio on, so loading affects run time).

we hope gutenberg users will use the chapter-by-chapter ripping software, and
will help out with a few cycles and maybe some bandwidth :-)

the new software, which i am using to rip the etc ... new year's cd does the
following :

1 - downloads the gutenberg book
2 - applies an author specific set of sed parsers to correct
mis-pronunciations.
3 - introduces appropriate pauses in the reading.
4 - dithers speech rate and voice baseline frequency to improve inflection.
5 - creates an .au file in a non-standard format.  sorry.
this is an emacspeak / viavoice artifact.  without the source code we can't
fix it.
6- creates .wav files
7 - upsamples the .wav file and introduces masking to reduce digitized
artifacts (i.e. "buzzing")
8 - expands the voice output in the critical mid-range.
9 - adds reflections to improve clarity, according to the guidelines
established for this by the German classical recording company, DGG,
a leader in this field.
10 - converts the wav file to mp3 and adds title information.
we would love to make this conform to koa(?) indexing requirements,
but our hands are full.