there is a command called say, which you can pipe stuff into, say -o foo.aiff will write the output to a file.

-b

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Thank you. Thank you for actually answering the question, and thank you for not being like all these other cock-knockers below.

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Comparison of question-answer fora:

	Ask Slashdot	Google Answers	USENET	jwz lazyweb
accuracy:	fair	good	both depend on phase of moon
SNR:	low	high	rock-bottom	never good enough
advantages:	fairly quick	semi-professional	worldwide guru coverage	highly entertaining
disadvantages:	troll infestation	pay to play	infinite spam	topics limited to current jwz frustration (could easily be more limited)
beware of:	GNAA	differences over what constitutes an answer	Nigerians	swift wrath
failure mode:	if answer not evident in first hour, only posts mocking question get modded up; must read all posts, Newest First, to get real answers	money squables	cascades from regulars flaming off-topic	kernel recompilation or switch-back-to-linux imperatives
what you will learn:	far more detail than you wanted to know	how easily you could have found what you just paid $20 for if you had spent another few minutes looking	that your question is either in the FAQ or a thread from last week	multicultural sexuality, technogoth DJ tips, and how to run a nightclub
what you won't learn:	whether the answer works without overclocking, a RC UAV case mod, and stolen winmodem driver source	how the geek who answered your $50 question in ten minutes found it	the canonical reference found in most libraries instead of the same answer in an obscure 1978 Ph.D. thesis	patience
worthwhile for:	often the top world expert provides the answer	tireless dedication of tens of thousands of food-stamp recipients working from their parents' basement	tenured subject experts still reading with trn on 24x80 Zenith-19s (because office clutter doesn't allow terminal upgrades) not distracted by web porn	angst-charged luser plonkings
respondents' motivations:	damn editor bitchslapped dupe complaints last week, excellent karma status at risk	making an easy buck	nemisis on other continent might upstage by providing quicker answer	one word: fanboys
question poster's motivation:	don't know how to use Google	don't know how to use Ask Slashdot	too poor to use Google Answers	computers hate jwz
50 years from now:	OSDN purchased by TimeDisneyOL; text no longer permitted on /.	Google purchased by Microsoft; only certified copies of IE for Win2055 Pro allowed to post questions	USENET posts classified as "indymedia copyrestriction crime" -- only graft by spam harvesters allows it to continue	General advice on cleaning up messy spills to giant teledildonic service robot manequins

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Your table is seriously breaking the layout. At least, I think I'm responding to strspn's comment, which is currently below my comment box. I think you mislaid a row somewhere.

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Sorry, I don't know why it did that. The HTML is perfect except for a missing slash before the final td tag. Still, that's perfectly legal and it shouldn't be messing everything else up.

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On a second look, it's just screwing up its own comment box a bit. Never mind.

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No, it has completely fucked the entire layout of the page if you look at it in Generator style.

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In which case I stand correct in the first place. Looks almost correct in the default BML view, though. I wonder why the layout's failing so dramatically.

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Holy crap!

lazyweb works?!?

I may have to re-examine my whole outlook on life...

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I know how much you hate teh lunix, but as I don't have a Magical Mac could you please, if you've some idle time, upload samples of piping the text through the chef / B1FF / etc filters before they go through /usr/bin/say?

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I find it incredibly hard to believe that you haven't heard of festival before. It's a bit bloaty, but kinda neat. The suggestion to use "say" is better though.

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Not wanting to use festival can be the result of not knowing about it...

Or just as likely, not wanting to use festival can be the result of knowing about it.

I think you presume too much. Festival isn't much easier than writing a Linux driver to control a Speak n' Spell, with similar quality results.

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Or just as likely, not wanting to use festival can be the result of knowing about it.

Bingo

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all the good voices are on windows :( which sucks on a number of levels.

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There are some great (commercial, $30ea) voices for Mac OS X's native text-to-speech synth available from Cepstral. If you're even a moderate user of TTS, they can be a fun addition to the standard set. And if anyone else hears your TTS audio, using one of the Cepstral voices sets it apart from the usual choices.

Now about getting those National Weather Service voices...

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Thirty dollars? I can get one of my students to sit under the desk and read it off an LCD for that price!

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WTF is wrong with you people?? The first god damn post answered the question concisely and correctly. I don't understand why you all feel the need to continue to go on about garbage like festival (you morons think that compiling some software is somehow easier than 'say?') and other shit that you have to pay for!

I suppose you are all probably just doing it on purpose to piss off jwz.

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Hmm, now that you mention it.

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Um, the Cepstral voices work with the built-in Mac OS X text-to-speech engine. They are plug-ins for it. They extend it. They make it work better. In this case the "shit" that you "have to pay for" is completely optional.

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Thirty dollars? I can get one of my students to sit under the desk and read it off an LCD for that price!

If I'm going to pay someone $30 to get under my desk, "reading text off an LCD" might not be the first thing I'd want them to do, but maybe that's just me.

I wonder if there's a "talking with your mouth full" voice module out there somewhere?

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If I'm going to pay someone $30 to get under my desk, "reading text off an LCD" might not be the first thing I'd want them to do, but maybe that's just me.

I wonder if there's a "talking with your mouth full" voice module out there somewhere?

I laughed. Giggled, even.

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You're a dumbass.

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Dude, holy crap...

Either I'm a retard when it comes to computers, or that festival program is really freakin' hard to install. Compiling? C++? ARGH! Plus, there's like 23 different files to download and I have no clue which ones I need!

Yeah, I guess I could Google for that C++ compiler thing but...isn't there anything out there that's a tad easier to install?

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who are you?

i searched for crack monkey on google and found this

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It's official then, I now hate google.

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I'm your mom, and I should have sold you when I had the chance.

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automator makes it easy. you can set up automator to allow you to drag a text file onto a workflow that will create an audio file. You even get a choice of what voice to use.

Assuming you have 10.4 of course.

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Wow, that sounds so much easier than using /usr/bin/say!

But hey thanks for reading before posting. You know how that really makes my day.

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What does "drag a text file onto a workflow" mean anyway?

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Once upon a veery long time ago there was such nifty tool for DOS. But that looks more like one of useless facts I have.

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