The idea is to turn the BBC World New Feed, or any other BBC feed, for that matter, into a "podcast". Podcasts are about audio content, and. in this case, the content is a speech-synthesized rendering of the original text.
I've been playing around with this idea for almost a year, using Creative Commons licensed feeds. But, as I understand your Terms of Use, you guys are saying it's ok for me to do this.
If so, many thanks!
Great idea, but the voice synth used is atrocious. These have come a long way in recent years. I would expect that they should be more of the standard demonstrated at
http://www.naturalvoices.att.com/demos/Recorded.html
(Try UK English - Audrey)
if this were to be a success
hmmm, the audio links consistantly cause my Safari browser to unexpectedly quit. I'll try it again another time. Great concept. Thanks.
On a related note, here is a free Windows app I wrote called Audiolicious that turns any RSS feed (not just BBC feeds) into a podcast: http://jonaquino.blogspot.com/2005/04/audiolicious-turn-any-rss-feed-into.html
Thats a great idea! The speech is a bit sketchy, hopefully you will be able to improve it. Good luck!
Thanks Jonathan,
I definitely want to address this problem. I am encoding the mp3 using lame on Linux, as in :
lame -vbr-old -V 0 file.mp3
Can you tell me what platform you're on?
Ted Gilchrist
Regarding comment #3; the issue of the Safari browser unexpectedly quitting was resolved within an hour of my posting. Delightful. Thanks again. :-)
The system uses the Festival speech synthesizer, opend source software developed at the University of Edinburgh. The "problem" is, when you listen to a voice long enough, you get used to it, and you grow to like it. But it also tends to render one fairly useless, as a judge of quality.
It truly pains me to hear my guys called "atrocious", but maybe I need a vacation.
That's really cool - and a nice looking page too. Do you think the voice might be clearer if it was slowed down slightly?
Great idea, Ted1
Thanks :)
This is very nice, I was thinking of doing something like this myself, however there might be something wrong with the MP3 encoding, it plays but mpg123 gives:
"Playing MPEG stream from bbcworld.535323dstm.mp3 ...
Junk at the beginning 49443303
MPEG 2.0 layer III, 64 kbit/s, 16000 Hz mono
Illegal Audio-MPEG-Header 0x54414753 at offset 0xfffffffb.
Skipped ID3 Tag!
Illegal Audio-MPEG-Header 0x75696369 at offset 0xfffffffb.
[1:23] Decoding of bbcworld.535323dstm.mp3 finished."