The
Neo Car Jukebox hard
disc based mp3 player now comes with
speech
firmware.
Basically, this consists of Fonix
iSpeak software that creates small mp3 files in the directory structure
of the hard disc. These files contain the spoken names of directories, play
lists and songs. The new Neo firmware recognizes these files (named *.mpf,
*.mpl and *.mps respectively) and plays them when the directory structure is
browsed.
Unfortunately Fonix iSpeak is software that runs under Windows only. Since
I maintain my mp3 collection under Solaris, this was not very useful to me.
So I decided to create the .mpf, .mpl and .mps files using text2wave from
the
Festival Speech Synthesis
System.
I named this script neospeak.
It should also work on other unixes like Linux or FreeBSD.