MP3/MD Combo Player

egnarts writes "Drag and drop mp3's to your minidisc, and better still generate voice overs from text. See zdnet for the story " Interesting. Every time I start thinking MD is dead, something happens to it. I wonder how successful this will be. Text-to-Voice could be quite useful.

Text-to-speech for Linux

A little offtopic, but insanely cool:

Festival [ed.ac.uk]

It's something of a hassle to get set up (there are a few software dependencies that you might have to get working first) but once it's going, it's unbelievable. It does stuff like real-time text-to-speech that lets you decide to either have the software "speak" the text directly or write it out as a sound file, "pluggable" voice databases so you can plug in your own phoneme samples that the software will speak with, a scheme-based scripting language and all kinds of other nifty things. Oh yeah, and it is distributed under an X11-style license.

It does a remarkably good job of figuring out how to pronounce words. It's obviously computer-generated, but nonetheless very understandable. The pluggable voice databases is possibly the coolest part, but I've not yet put the effort into figuring out how difficult a new database would be to create/set up.

I think somewhere out there is even a Festival script that gets and speaks the latest /. headlines. Now if only we could get a CmdrTaco voice database for it....

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MD is coming in NOW

I've been doing this for the last month since I picked up a Sharp 722 for $200 bucks from minidisco.com. There is no end of the advantages to having MD over plain old mp3 player.

* everytime you want a new song or want to tweak the contents of your MD, you have to reload the whole thing. I feel like a new playlist, I just pop in a new disk.

*Easily dump cd's, mp3s, voice, or mic to the MD. Everything you can dump to a mp3 player.

* MD is standardized. No worries about what nastiness the RIAA can cook up.

* similar battery capacity and size of current mp3 players.

Now that the price for portables has dropped quite a bit, I really think MD's gonna start heading into the mainstream in america. They're insanely popular in japan, and have been for awhile.

MD vs MP3

As the proud owner of a Sony MZ-R50 portable MD recorder and a Sony MDS JE510 home MD deck, and someone with a 3GB+ collection of MP3s and over 220 CDs, I can say that MD rocks!

Find me a portable MP3 player that fits in your jeans pocket and holds 74 minutes of CD quality music. I haven't yet.

CDs portables are too bulky to transport and you can get a MD recorder for the price of a good anti-skip portable CD player.

Not only are MD recorders getting smaller and better battery life, they have a standard media that you can swap any time. I can carry my MD player in one pocket and 4 MD in the other. And with the battery life on just the rechargeable, I can listen to all of those MDs a couple times before my battery dies.

If I want to listen to MP3s I just copy them onto a MD via my JE510. Excellent. Get a sound card with an optical out and your talking digital copying to your MD.(Xitel Storm Platinum is an example)

MD is far from dead. Get your mind out of the US centric world and take a look at Europe and Japan. More MD units are sold in Japan than any where else in the world and they obviously sell, other wise why would new units be made? Check out the new Sony MZ-R90. It's only millimetres larger than an MD and only two MDs thick. And it has a battery life of something like 30 hours.

MD is much more versatile than MP3 and until MP3 units are able to store in the region of 128MB, I won't be buying one.