This was done using the ancient Apple Macintosh 1995-vintage built-in MacOs 7.5.3 text-to-speech technology. The sound was encoded as .wav files using my Cincinnati bedroom's second-hand PowerMac 7100/80 AV, a 10-year-old (at least) Panasonic handheld mono cassette recorder, and a brand new Radio Shack mini-plug audio cable I just got today for $3.99 to connect the two. As for the capabilities of the Mac, I did not even push them -- used half the available sampling rate, 22k not 44k, in 8 not 16 bits, in mono, not stereo.
The only modification to the texts I made was to add periods at the end of every line, to slow down SimpleText, which otherwise would not pause while it goes on to, to quote another songwriter, talk to me, like lovers do.
The recording was done using Apple's old SimpleText version 1.2, through its built-in Sound menu and its Play Selection text-to-speech menu item, which uses any one of the several voices in the Voices folder supplied with the operating system. This is old Apple technology, and much better results can be had, including Speech recognition, using new stuff. But this is all I have in Cincinnati, my best toys remaining in Chicago and Evanston. Which is only fair, as these are Bedroom Tapes, after all, and Hissing ones, at that.
The sound played very nicely through the computer's loudspeaker, and everything from that point on was about not deteriorating it beyond the point of usability as I tried to capture it for web consumption.
The text-to-speech Bob and Joni were recorded over the air using the recorder's built-in microphone. Then I played the sound back into the computer using the cable to connect the recorder as input source to the computer's microphone jack. (Recording directly from the computer using the computer's output jack resulted in severe distortion as I have no means of adjusting the input level on the recorder.)
I used the freeware SoundRecorder 1.0, Copyright by Bernhard Jenny, November 1998, to make the recording digitally on the computer's hard drive disk and to save it to the wav format for my Windows' friends convenience though Quicktime would have been a better trade-off in space and streaming technology -- but I did not want to put anyone out by making them go get the free Quicktime software. I did some other poking around, slight cleanup and cutting off excess signal, using a shareware version of Felt Tip Sound Studio 1.1.2, a disk-based sound editor, Copyright November 13, 1999 by Lucius Kwok. I found these two excellent programs using the shareware FTP client and Net software search facility for the Mac, Anarchie 3.7, itself a most excellent program.
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Last Modified: 2007/7/28.