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On a seperate note I could easily create a windows program that would take the empeg database (CSV file) and export prerecorded TTS to pcm, wav, or mp3. I could make it export the name of each artist, album, and title to audio files. I have pretty much all the source code I need to do this in very little time (see my software at www.zabaware.com) It would be minor work for me to read in the CSV file to export all the fields as audio files.

But I don't have enough linux experience to be able to write any useful TTS app for the empeg. But knowing that I volunteer to make a windows program that creates prerecorded TTS audio files based on any set of data, is there any linux programmer out there interested in creating some usefull TTS app for the empeg?

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Hi, interesting ideas, if you were to create PCM versions (at 44.1Khz sample rate), of all the songs in the CSV file, then you could esaily output these on the empeg as the DSP takes PCM files, and the pcmplay (and setvol) utilities can be used.

Note, if you name the PCM files using the FID of the tune (which I assume is available in the CSV file format exported by Emplode - if not then the XML version has FIDs in it), then it is easy to find the FID of the currently playing song, so you could then "mix" the PCM audio pre-spoken title of the song in to the audio stream.

However, that won't help with the speaking while browsing capabilities that the phatbox has.

The long term solution is to have a TTS engine on the Empeg, but that may require a lot of CPU for a real time spoken song titles as they play solution.

However a interim step may be to have a "on empeg" TTS engine and have it run automatically (or manually) run anytime that the tune database changed to rebuild the spoken title/playlist database. (i.e. do what emplode does during its database rebuild but for the spoken track names.)