Well, I've given the new send audio feature a good workout, and I've
decided that it has a place among those who truly hate the DoubleTalk
speech. I'm not one of those, so it's back to the old, tried and true
way of reading braille and text for me.
I found, in using VW Kate, that my book would be significantly
truncated--to the tune of say 10 to 12 percent of the book getting
lopped off. Nothing worse than being right near the suspenseful ending
of the book only to have the Book Port solemnly announce, "End of
(title)."
I knew that book was no way over...it just couldn't end the way it was
ending! So I re-transferred it using the regular non-audio method, and
sure enough, I got the end and all was well--both with the characters in
the book and consequently with me. :-)
So I suspect I have a setting somewhere that's causing VW Kate to
maliciously truncate my books. Otherwise, she did a nice job. There
were no artifacts that I could hear in the MP3 encoding, and the ability
to pick the speed before the transfer is, of course, a must-have. The
volume of the recording was excellent, and the frequency response was
nice across the board as far as I'm concerned. The S sounds indeed
sounded like S rather than F and so forth. It was a lot of fun to read
that way, and if I can figure out how to end that truncation thing, I
might try it again someday. But I use DoubleTalk at work and at home on
my PCs in both locations, so I'm enough of a fan that going back to it
for text files really makes sense.
Again, please don't misinterpret this as criticism. I can see how the
ability to pick other voices to read text has its place among many, many
users. I just won't be one of them. I don't currently have a heart
condition, but I could get one awfully quick if my mysteries were always
truncated right at the critical section!
Best Regards,
Nolan
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