29 Jul
Narrator 2.0.2
Editor’s note: The following critique is part of Macworld’s Summer of Mac Gems series. Each business day till the middle of August 2008, the Macworld staff will use the Mac Gems blog to briefly cover a favorite free or low-cost program. Visit the Mac Gems homepage for a list of out of the reach of Mac Gems.
Product:Narrator 2.0.2 Rating CompanyDejal Price as rated$19 OS compatibilityOS 10.5 (Leopard) Processor compatibilityUniversal Related Music and Audio Articles Narrator 2.0.2 Ableton updates Live audio sequencer Yahoo: Burn your DRMed tracks to CD now Native Instruments updates Traktor 3 and Traktor Scratch Steinberg ships consumer music recording app, Sequel 2 Recent Mac Gems Posts Narrator 2.0.2 MetaX 2.4.5 Lostify 0.7 Mac Gems home View all Macworld blogs
Of course, your Mac can talk: Highlight text in TextEdit, for pattern, select Edit: Speech: Start Speaking, and one of OS X’s built-in system voices direct recite your words. But the Mac’s default text-to-speech tools don’t continually let you specify which voice will practise the reciting or let you assign divergent voices to different parts of your document. (That’s a problem if you’re writing a play or movie, but also if you want to hear what different people declared in a concourse whither you were taking notes.)
Narrator 2.0.2
That’s the problem Dejal’s Narrator 2.0.2 solves. Paste your text into it, assign the program’s “characters” to their lines, and then hear your text come to period of life. Narrator will use any of OS X’s built-in system voices (including the new, comparatively natural Alex that debuted in OS X 10.5); granting that those voices aren’t enough, you can download more from Dejal. You can in like manner configure rate, fix, inflection, and volume for each one.
