Voices Creating Software For Mac
From alien voice to robotic voice, cartoon voice and many more, you can control the voice changing experience as per the requirement. Also, there are real-time voice changing tool that let you switch voices on a live call. We have included the best software for Mac but if you want to add any other Mac software, then comment in the section below. Here is wonderful software that almost gets it right: NaturalReader. This software turns text into speech with voices that are way more sophisticated then any speech software of your Operating system. It is available for both Mac and PC. Have a look at this video and you will find out this is much better then any robot voice you ever heard. Jan 24, 2012 How To: Adding New Voices For Text To Speech In Mac OS X Lion. As many of you would know Apple has presented text to speech in the Mac OS for many years even pre-dating Mac OS X. Well, with the release of Mac OS X Lion they have expanded on the available voices. Jul 14, 2020 What is Other on Mac Storage? Just like the ‘Other’ on iPhone and iPad, it is home to several files, cached data, and more.This section houses a mix of junk and important files. In the simplest of terms, the “Other” category is a combination of files. Jul 01, 2020 The US English voices Julie and Paul are very high quality TTS voices and they sound the most natural to me. I like how you can change the speed, pitch, break, and volume of the voices by using simple VTML in the editor. Overall, this software I would give a 9/10 just for its simplicity and quality of the voices.
With the ability to target specific demographics, and reach around the world, online audio advertising is an obvious pick for many marketers. Its ability to be traced and verified also makes it appealing, as it’s easier to track your return on investment, when compared with older forms of advertising.
Online Audio Ads
Here are some considerations to keep in mind when it comes to formatting and broadcasting your online audio ads.
Format Your Audio Ad Files into MP3s
The standard digital audio format for audio ads and podcasts is MP3. There are different measures of quality within an MP3 file. As a marketer, you will want to select the audio quality that sounds great but also plays quickly for listeners.
If your audio ad is mostly voice with no background music or musical segments, you may want to consider using a mono file as this will reduce the MP3’s file size and as a result, minimize your ad’s download time even more.
Test Your Audio Quality by Listening to Your Ad Across Multiple Devices
To ensure your ad comes across well, regardless of what your audience uses when listening, see if your mixed down MP3 sounds good on a variety of stereo systems such as your computer speakers, headphones, mobile phones and and mobile phones with the speakerphone enabled.
This can be incredibly helpful to ensuring that you have your edited version up to a standard of quality that will represent your brand well, no matter where your messages are heard.
File Conversion – Converting to MP3
Generally, you will have the option to save or export your recording as an MP3. If the only option is to export as a WAV file, that’s OK too. You’ll just have to complete one extra step to convert the WAV file to an MP3 file.
Digital Audio File Sizes – File Tips
A WAV (or an AIFF, if you’re a MAC user) is an uncompressed audio file. They tend to be larger files, but they are of better quality than other file formats.
With an MP3 or AAC files, you sacrifice quality but the file size is much smaller.
While the duration for audio ads may vary, but regardless of the length, the audio clips must be exactly the specified length or they will be declined by the advertising system.
Audio Recording Software
Recording software allows users to easily layer, mix, and transform audio recordings into songs featuring a variety of instruments and effects. The same software often also has the ability to merge elements into audio ads.
There are a variety of recording software options on the market, both for free and for a cost. Take stock of what your needs are, and investigate the options available to you to make sure they’ll meet your needs before you invest time and/or money.
Some popular programs include Audacity, Garageband, Anvil Studio and Kristal.
Planning Your Audio Mix
Balancing your mix just right, is crucial to making sure that all the elements of your ad come together as intended. The goal of your audio mix is to maintain your vision for the sound from the beginning to the end.
Soloing Specific Sounds In Your Mix
As an editing tip, it can be helpful to first hear each track, one at at time. By using the Solo feature, all other tracks will be muted allowing you to only hear the track you have designated. As a rule of thumb, the voice over should be the loudest and clearest element of your mix.
As you’re listening, you can apply special effects, like volume faders, compressors, and normalization, as well as control the threshold and ratio. More on these below:
Volume Faders – Control the Volume
Each track in your mix has it own fader that controls the volume level. Increase and decrease the levels to make a particular track sound louder or quieter.
Compressors – Reduce Dynamic Ranges
A compressor’s basic function is to reduce the dynamic range of an audio recording, which is the difference between the loudest and softest sounds in a recording.
By reducing the volume of the loudest sounds, a compressor lets you raise the level of the entire audio track, making it all sound louder than it actually is. Compression can be a big help in achieving intelligible audio tracks with a more uniform volume that will sound great on any stereo system.
A compressor consists of a level detector that measures the incoming signal, and an amplifier that controls the gain by the level detector.
The Threshold
A Threshold control sets the level at which compression begins. Below the Threshold, the compressor acts like a straight piece of wire. But when the input level reaches the Threshold, then the compressor begins reducing its output level by an amount determined by the Ratio control.
The Ratio
The Ratio control establishes the proportion of change between the input and output levels. If you set the compression Ratio to 2:1, then when the input signal gets twice as loud, the output signal will increase by only half.
If you set the Ratio to its maximum (10:1 or more), the compressor becomes a limiter that locks the maximum level at the Threshold.
While a compressor can level out a recording, high levels of compression can also introduce artifacts (unwanted sound from editing) including pumping, in which there is an audible up and down change in volume of a track, or breathing, which sounds like someone breathing as the background noise level goes up and down.
Normalization – Clarify audio and reduce distortion
Normalizing increases the gain of the audio file until its loudest point is at maximum level. The overall signal level is now higher, which makes for clearer audio, and also gives the encoder more bits of data to work with and reduces encoding distortion.
The only downside of normalizing is that it increases the noise as well as the audio signal so it should be used carefully. It should be your last step before encoding, and you may not need it at all.
With these tips in mind, and with endless other resources available, creating your own ads for use on various platforms is within your reach.
As I write this, it's the Macintosh's 29th birthday. This takes me back to the Mac's very early days in the mid-eighties when, even then, its operating system was outfitted with synthetic speech capabilities. Heck, we even used to have a talking moose! And, who can forget young Steve Jobs introducing the new Macintosh on-stage in 1984? Using software called MacinTalk, it announced itself to the world by saying, 'Hello. I'm Macintosh. It sure is great to get out of that bag.'
The Talking Moose provided many Mac old-timers with hours of silly fun.
Early voices were highly robotic and astonishingly crude by today's standards. Nevertheless, back then, it was downright awe-inspiring. This was something from the future! The synthesized Mac voices were used to entertain many a Mac aficionado at user group meetings across the world.
Vestiges of early artificial-sounding voices are still present today as novelties for some light-hearted, geeky entertainment – or for the nostalgic. In a bit,I'll show you how to try these out for yourself.
When OS X 10.5 Leopard was uncaged back in 2007, Apple included some new high-fidelity text-to-speech capabilities in the form of a single new voice called Alex. This mellifluous male voice included breath and pause control to augment comprehension of the spoken words and phrases. As a result of this vast improvement, I immediately found the use of synthetic speech to finally provide value for me. I began using Alex to read articles and other text to me while I was engaged doing something else, and I found that I no longer needed to listen closely, straining to understand what was being said.
The technology in Alex presents a huge advantage to those who, due to visual impairment, regularly require screen-reading capabilities. Additionally, the higher quality voice is quite valuable to Mac users who might be learning english pronunciation and sentence formation.
Bioshock. Fallout. League of legends mac app won& 39. Combat Arms.
As for me, aside from the fact that text-to-speech is a huge help when my aging eyes are tired after a long day at the keyboard, I have found this capability to be incredibly useful as a proofreading tool for the very same articles you read in my How-To column here at TMO. Simply reading to catch typos and punctuation errors is one thing. Having an entity read the article to me is invaluable. It helps me to hear how my words flow and how clearly the concepts and ideas express themselves.
Alex is wonderful. But, he's overworked, and I have sent him out to pasture.
Allow me to introduce you to someone. Say hello to my little friend, Samantha. She is a Alex's sibling – a high-quality American English female voice which I find to be quite soothing and highly coherent. Starting with OS X Lion, Alex, Samantha and several other high-quality voices are available for you to choose from. Additionally, choices include international voices that will support several languages and dialects.
Most of the high-quality voices are not pre-installed because the software voice files are quite large in size. But they are selectable, and you can sample them before deciding to automatically download and install them free-of-charge from Apple's servers.
Let's jump in and see how this works.
For OS versions prior to Mountain Lion, the voice options and controls are located in the Speech System Preferences panel. Starting with Mountain Lion, this has been renamed to Dictation & Speech. Once in the panel, be sure to click on the Text to Speech tab.
The Dictation and Speech System Preferences panel in Mountain Lion.
Click the System Voice pop-up menu to reveal voices already installed in your system. The voices are organized by language, and the one marked with a check is the one currently set as your System Voice.
Clicking on System Voice pops up a list showing all the installed voices. The checked one is the currently selected System Voice.
For the really good stuff, select Customize at the bottom of the System Voice pop-up list. This will reveal a pane containing quite a few other voices available in several languages. High-quality voice, Alex, is pre-installed. Notice that you can play a sample of any voice without actually having it installed. Simply select a voice and click the Play button.
In the Customize pane, you can sample all voices and select ones to download and install.
By ticking a checkbox, the selected voice will be added to your working list of ones shown in the System Voice popup menu. A yellow warning sign appearing beside the checked voice indicates that it is one of the new high-quality voices that you can obtain for free. The voice file is downloaded when you click OK. The Software Update mechanism handles the download and installation process.
As you can see back in the Preferences panel for Text to Speech, you can select other features controlling behavior characteristics of the System Voice. For example, selecting the checkbox labeled “Speak selected text when the key is pressed' lets you configure a keyboard shortcut to have the System Voice speak any selected text.
Inside the Customize pane, you can sample and activate the goofy Novelty Voices.
Voices Creating Software For Mac Pro
What about those goofy, but ageless, legacy voices I mentioned earlier? You know, the ones like Zarvox that makes your Mac sound like a constipated robot. Or.. how about Hysterical making your Mac sound like it has worked for days without any sleep? Check these and more retro voices located in the 'English (United States) – Novelty' section of the Customize pane.
Your System Voice can be used in many practical ways. I use Samantha most often for reading back selected text. One way I activate this is by right-clicking (or Control-clicking) on any selected text and choosing Speech > Start Speaking in the contextual pop-up menu.
Right-clicking on selected text will allow you to have the text spoken with the System Voice.
Free Voices For Mac
You don't have to be afflicted by poor vision to take advantage of the Mac's speech capabilities. I encourage you to play around with this feature, and explore the many interesting ways the System Voice can enhance your workflow.