Category: Geeks r Us
Hello to all NVDA users,
I just found this synthesizer for NVDA, and you can download from Here.
Thanks,
Socheat
I did install it. I find it rather unconvincing and difficult to understand. But appreciate the analog simulation in all those sliders they have for various parameters of the synthesizer.
But the overall quality, I just had a hard time understanding it, and I haven't had that much trouble with a synth since the 80s. Even harder to understand than ESpeak. Unless you have some voice parameters you recommend to have set to make it more understandable.
Speech Player is a confusing name. The synthesiser is in early stages of development, so I won't install it yet. When it is good enough it will be NVDA's default synthesiser in newer versions.
Personally I prefer more natural sounding voices. NVDA has settings that make them work satisfactorily.
But at least it is very responsible.
Never found one I like better than eloquence.
How about vocalizer?
In my experience, VVocaliser is preferred by people who are using speech software for the first time because they find it easier to understand. You have to pay for it in NVDA, so if you already hae another screenreader that uses th voices, you could end up paying for them twice. That is something I will not do. I would rather use an alternative synthesiser that I only have to pay for once
I agreed with you there.
But anyways, this synthesizer is still in the development, so we can't complain much.
What's wrong with ESpeak? I mean, I think it's cool that the guys who write NVDA are writing their own speech synthesizer. I've always wanted to learn to do that. But when people hear that I'm using ESpeak, I get all these comments like "ugh! Espeak! How can you stand it?! And how can you understand it at fast speeds"
Well, I can. I like the voices that even the robots find robotic.
It's the sound of ESpeak I don't like. It isn't nice in headphones. Dectalk and Eloquence both sound better than ESpeak.
Voyager I'll try and explain it from another perspective, though I have never written a synthesizer. When I was younger, though, I wrote sounds for keyboards. Before all these banks of shit that comes with everything, we wrote our own horns and stuff. Anyway, there are filters in sound that can be used to elevate harmonics. ESpeak sounds like someone didn't know how to tweak the high pass filter correctly, or resonate the high frequency oscillator correctly, because part of it really screeches.
Ok that was techie but in a weird way.
Simple answer: Take it from a man of experience. ESpeak hurts on a hangover, like no other synthesizer I have heard does.
I'm actually trying to write some instrument functions for a project I'm working on. Right now they're extremely simple - basically sine and square waves. Do you know of a place where I can learn to write more interesting sounds?
well, I use espeak pretty much with NVDA,especially if Iam at other peoples placestroubleshooting pc problems. I useklat 2, as the rest of them just don't fit me at all. but yes, I like the apporatch that they are taking with this though. once they have it down good enough to be inclooded into NVDA you can et people will like it. it sort of reminds me of old eloquence that was used in jaws3.0, if anyone remembers how htat even sounds now.
Yes, sure
Voyager, my synthesis days are quite long gone. But if your emulator emulates an
oscillator, which it sounds like it does, it sounds like you should get the full complement of
wave forms: sine, triangle sign, square and sawtooth. These are the base component of
all synthetic and natural implementation. But beyond wave forms, there are a lot of other
necessary processing components.
My advice, go on Craigslist or something and see if you can pick up a mini Moog
synthesizer. It is my opinion anyone wanting to learn the anatomy of synthetic sound
creations should start analog, where you don't have convenient digital functions that hide
and quantize away what's going on. All the great synthesis engineers still use analog
emulation from time to time. Once you go digital, whole universes of dimensions will open
up for you, even in FM synthesis, but I've always felt analog was the best place to learn
the basics and anatomy of wave forms and construction. Of course, none of this is
necessary anymore. It's all sampled, which opens up even more dimensional universes to
explore. But I remember just how much fun it was making that stuff.
I know all the published happy hipsters who own more gear than some of us dreamed
about will think it strange. But yeah. Just some musings of a middle-age white guy who
used to do some of this at one time.
Sorry to have derailed this thread.