... 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.