Text Reader

A Text-To-Audio Solution for Mac OS X

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Current version: 1.2.1

Requires: Mac OS X 10.2 or later (including 10.3)

Go get it. (Older: 1.2, 1.1.1, 1.1, 1.0)

Message Board for Text Reader support and discussion.

Report bugs or feature requests.

About

All I wanted was a program that took a text file and saved it to an audio file for my iPod. All I could find were programs I had to pay for to do this simple task that can be accomplished in one line of AppleScript. That’s silly. So, I wrote a very simple program to do this and more.

More? It can optionally (as of 1.1) tell iTunes to import and convert the file into its own playlist, letting you set the author and genre. It’s also a very simple plain-text editor as well. No more waiting for BBEdit to kick up or worrying that Text Edit will save an RTF file instead.

As of 1.2, you can also change the rate and pitch of the speech as it’s saved (does not affect playback in the GUI).

Text Reader is 100% free. Hosting is not. If you like the program, use it, and feel you have some change to spare, please consider helping me break even on the cost of the site. You are not paying for the program. Use that guilt-free forever.

Version History

1.2.1 – October 18, 2003

• Fixed French localization


• Fixed version number mismatch

1.2 – October 17, 2003

• Rewrote entire application in Cocoa


• Added preferences for pitch and rate


• AIFF export dialog is a little smarter about file extensions


• Performance increase for large sound exports


• Performance increase for large number of windows

1.1.1 – September 27, 2003

• Fixed bug where the encoding folder might not be used in an iTunes export.


• Fixed bug where the AIFF files from an iTunes export might be overwritten if the document was exported again.
  

1.1 – September 12, 2003

• Added iTunes export (makes a new playlist, adds the AIFF, and optionally encodes it)


• Added support for files ending in “trdr” to open automatically in Text Reader.


• Added icons (kudos to Matthew King)


• Added a few preferences to control the iTunes export


•  


• Some menu options now disable when there are no windows.

1.0 – Sepember 4, 2003

• Initial release

Plans for the Future?

• A text replacement engine so oft-mistaken words can be replaced. Probably before 1.5.
• A sort of batch-processing list document that can have entries that are either text files or one-liners. Each entry will have its own settings. Probably 2.0.