foo_talktome, A remake of foo_tts for text-to-speech title/artist on track change Options

[aganders3]

Hello! I've just finished coding a working version of my first plugin, foo_talktome. I wanted a plugin to read the title and artist of each track that played, because I often listen to music on my wireless headphones. When I listen to my whole library or a group of new albums on random, this helps me remember who/what I liked. Hopefully others will enjoy this too!

Before writing this I checked if it existed already, and I found foo_tts, written by paulski. It seemed development on that had stopped, however, and there were even requests for a new version, so I went ahead with my little project. Hopefully I'm not stepping on any other devs' toes with this!

Download foo_talktome.dll v1.0 here
(or here)
(These links should be up-to-date)

Just put the dll in the Components directory and it should add a menu option (under Playback) to turn it off/on.

Please use the issue tracker on the BitBucket Repo to report bugs/feature requests.

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Update! Version 1.0 released May 7, 20122013 (That's a long time between updates.)

Thanks to danthe0 some major unicode-related bugs have been addressed. Now you should be able to get this working with Asian characters/voices. I am also now building with the latest SDK version, so you will need Foobar2000 v1.1 to use this component (sorry! if you need/want an older version please let me know - I may have it). Thanks to everyone who uses this component, and especially those of you who contribute feedback, bug reports, and even code! To celebrate these major changes/improvements, I am bumping the version number to 1.0.

Along with this new version, I am officially announcing the code as open source. The source has been up for a while, but I just realized I never made that announcement here.

Finally, my use of this plugin has diminished, hence the slowdown in development. I know there is another TTS plugin out now, and it seems to have some really cool features. However, I am happy to keep working on this if there is still interest in foo_talktome. I am also interested in helping/working with other developers to create TTS or other interesting Foobar components - just PM me if you'd like to work together on something.

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Update! September 7, 2011

Hey everyone. I'm glad people are still getting use out of this plugin! I halted development for a while because things seemed to be working pretty well, but I know there are some serious bugs out there still. In order to keep up with everything, I'd like to move development and issue tracking over to my Bitbucket repository:

https://bitbucket.org/aganders3/foo_talktome

There is a public wiki and issue tracker there, and you don't need an account to post on the issue tracker (though it's better if you make one). I've added a few issues/feature requests from this thread to the system there, but I'm sure I missed quite a few. If you have an issue or feature request, please add it on the Bitbucket issue tracker.

This is also my first step toward releasing the source code for this plugin, just so the project can live on even if I become too busy to maintain it. I'm not quite ready to do that, though, as I'm still a bit shy about my coding abilities.

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June 22, 2010 - OK, it took some playing around, but the new version seems to be working!

Download foo_talktome v0.4

(Hopefully) Fixed in this version:
* No more dll dependencies, everything should be statically linked (Still figuring out dependency walker, but I hope it's working)
* Remembers the state on shutdown

Thanks again to everyone who has downloaded or shown interest in my plugin! This has been a great learning experience for me so far.


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June 28, 2010 - A new version is released!

Download foo_talktome v0.5

New features:
* A preferences pane!
* You decide the speech formatting (uses built-in Foobar2000 title formatting strings)
* An option to pause playback while speaking

I also tried to fix the 0 volume bug that was brought up. I was never able to reproduce it, though, so I'm not sure the changes worked. I've taken note of the other suggestions in this thread (volume fading when speaking, announcing at the end of the song...), and I will try to work on them over time, but implementation of some of them is not quite straightforward to me.

As far as other voices go, you can set the voice in the Windows speech control panel. You can install other voices, but they tend to not be free and/or easy to find. The voice engines from Neospeech have been recommended in this thread (thanks Andreasvb).


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July 01, 2010 - Another new version is released!

Download foo_talktome.dll v0.5.1
(I don't know anything about version numbering andI felt I was approaching 1.0 much too quickly so I moved to a double-point system. Why not?)

Fixes/features:
* Improved volume scaling - this was indeed a linear/logarithmic scale thing (thanks kode54). Sadly the only reason I didn't do it properly the first time around is because I didn't have a pen or pencil handy. I'm pretty happy with the way it is now, but I may add another option to lower/boost the volume of the voice relative to the music if there is a lot of demand.
* Much bigger box for the speech formatting string. Thank carpman for requesting this - I never would have thought of it otherwise. Should accept 2048 characters or so now, hopefully that's big enough.

Enjoy!


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July 19, 2010

Download foo_talktome.dll v0.6

Features:
* Now includes a volume-offset field in the preferences pane. You can use a negative or a positive offset, input in dB.

Hopefully this is helpful for some people.

NOTE: For those of you that keep Foobar set at 0.0dB attenuation (max volume) this will only help you make the TTS voice quieter. At this point I can only control the volume of the synthesized voice. If you want the voice louder relative to the music, try boosting your system volume, lowering your Foobar volume, and adding a positive volume offset in the TalkToMe preferences.

This post has been edited by aganders3: May 8 2013, 15:28

[q-stankovic]

It should be there on the Playback menu with then name TalkToMe on it.

Playback menu - not prefrences! The playback menu is part of the main menu that is not shown in your "skin".